[Nottingham] Grub error or HD prob?

[lists at voila.fr]

> > The partition is FAT32 and I have no other filesystems mounted.
> > 
> > Since I can neither boot nor mount the bugger, I'm thinking that something is wrong physically. A guy at work said that the first 512k of the hd might be toasted - if so, is it possible to fix it?
> > 
> I had a very similar problem recently. XP wouldn't boot & Linux wouldn't 
> mount it.
> 
> 1. mount failed. kern.log said:
> ...
> kernel: FAT: invalid media value (0xb8)
> kernel: VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev hda1
> ...
> 
> 2. fsck.vfat is useless -- it crashes when it finds something it doesn't 
> understand
> 
> 3. Recovering from the backup FAT WORKED!!
> 
> #### Go get the FAT's ...
> # dd if=/dev/hda1 of=fat bs=256 count=12
> # dd if=/dev/hda1 of=backup.fat bs=256 count=12 skip=12
> 
> #### Hex dump to see what's different ...
> # hd -v fat > fat.hd
> # hd -v backup.fat > backup.fat.hd
> # diff -u backup.fat.hd fat.hd
> ...
> #### Cross fingers & restore from the backup
> # dd if=backup.fat of=/dev/hda1 bs=256 count=12
> 
I used PowerMax from Maxtor to run a few tests. The result :

Hard drive failing, contact Maxtor immediately.

I need to run it again and send them some sort of log so they can analyze the issue.

Wonderful way to spend a hot weekend - fixing a problem with bloody Windows.

Happy I'm not.

Matt

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