[Gllug] Rescue a hard disk (partially partitioned/ boot record error/ other ?)

[Jonathan Dye]

At 11:41 26/03/02 -0000, you wrote:
>I've really badly messed up my (mainly windows) machine at home.
>
>The machine at home has to have windows on it as my pregnant partner uses it
>to dial into work. It has two hard disks one at about 40G which is all
>windows and a smaller old one, (perhaps about 2G?) which red hat 7 (.1 I
>think) on it. I boot red hat from a floppy, without which windows (ME)
>*used* to start... I really can't afford to just reformat and reload windows
>as it'll wipe out the specialist s/w she has to connect to her work. It'll
>also lose a whole bunch of personal stuff, which I haven't backed up for the
>last 6 months...
>
>With floppy I can boot into Red Hat, which is why I'm posting to a Linux
>group, also I think Linux disk tools which are available will be more useful
>than booting from a DOS floppy which then doesn't allow me to read the C
>drive.
>
>At little background - Last night I tried to get the Alcatel USB modem
>working in Red Hat, and in the course of researching I saw a couple of
>things about "Smoothwall" saying it took care of the nitty gritty. I had a
>bootable CD rom of it on a back issue Linux Magazine (I think) and thought,
>let's give it ago...it was late (past girl crying like a banshee in the
>Oscars), I was tired and I very stupidly just rebooted and within a couple
>of seconds, I thought better of it as  it looked like it'd wipe hda1
>(windows). The machine rebooted, obviously nothing happened after the bios
>bits. I think I've repartitioned the main drive, but I may have just lost
>the boot records.
>
>I might just need to get a new boot record, can that be done without messing
>up the rest of the data (if it is still there)? Indeed is there a way of
>checking if there is some data there? I have little to no idea if there's
>anyway of rescuing the data on the drive. I'm currently at work if any kind
>soul could suggest a plan of attack and recovering the disk I'd be grateful.
>
>In Red hat I can't mount hda1, I tried a couple of fsck commands on the
>/dev/hda1 (which incidentally I seem to only be able to run as ./fsck not a
>straight fsck). I can't say EXACTLY what the commands all were (I was using
>the Marcel Gagne Linux System Administration book as a reference), but I
>recall getting a response saying fsck.vfat was missing, and error: mount:
>wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda1 or too many mounted
>file systems

If it is complaining that it can't find fsck.vfat then there must be a
partition table there that says that hda1 exisits and is a fat (windows)
partition.

You could try running fdisk from a linux boot disk which will allow you to
view the partitions on the drive to ensure that you haven't removed the
partition or screwed up the partition table.

What happens when you try to start the machine without the boot disk?  What
error messages do you get?

If you have a windows boot disk with fdisk on it then you could try running
fdisk /mbr from it and it'll rebuild you boot record the Microsoft way
which might be enough to get you working.

>Any advice most gratefully received. I have to pop out for a coupe of hours
>now and finish my VAT return (what a great day I'm having :D ), but will
>read and respond to any posts later.


JD

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