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

Liam Delahunty ldelahunty at britstream.com
Tue Mar 26 11:41:25 UTC 2002


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

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.

Kind regards,
Liam
http://www.corx.co.uk/
:: Tune In :: Drop Down  :: Game On ::



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