From: John P. Looney (john at domain antefacto.com)
Date: Thu 13 Jun 2002 - 11:55:47 IST
On Thu, Jun 13, 2002 at 10:22:49AM +0100, Philip Trickett mentioned:
> Would anyone have any suggestions for the following:
> A user, not really in an awake mode, was trying to create a new network
> boot floppy for the installation of RedHat 7.3 over a network. The
> command used was:
> dd if=bootnet.img of=/dev/hda
> Now, you can see the problem, as the first 1.44 mb of the hard disk was
> overwritten by the install floppy image, and the computer just does
> exactly as the install image would do when it is booted.
>
> It looks as if it took the partition tables with it as well when this
> happened as fdisk cannot see any partitions.
Ow. No shit. I did exactly this to my home machine when I was running
DOS, and writing a bootloader, years back. I accidentally wrote 1024 'X's
to my partitiontable & bootblock.
First thing to do is to boot from floppy (not your new floppy-looking
hard drive!) and try re-create the partitions, by guessing. Then try mount
them read-only. You can be quite sure that the first filesystem is
irrecoverable.
In my case, I (and a few others) spent over 12 hours using norton
diskedit to scan through the disk looking for the starts of boot sectors.
It worked too!
Kate
-- _______________________________________ John Looney Chief Scientist a n t e f a c t o t: +353 1 8586004 www.antefacto.com f: +353 1 8586014
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