Restoring MBR - Solved

[Jerry Feldman]

On Mon, 03 Jan 2005 11:16:16 -0500
Bill Horne <bill at horne.net> wrote:

> My thanks to Jerry for his suggestions. Here's what I did:
> 
> 1. I used Tom's Root/Boot floppy to get Linux running on the machine: 
> http://www.toms.net/rb/
> 2. I used gpart to guess and reset the partition table values: 
> http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/76201/gpart/
> 3. I used Partition Magic 5.0 to repair various file-system length 
> discrepancies, such as CHS vs LBA differences.
> 
> Lessons Learned:
> 
> 1. If you download the online version of Partition Magic and don't pay

> for the CD, you should write the install key on the CD-R you use to
back 
> up the online version. ;-J
> 2. The only way to find out if your recovery plan is valid is to trash

> your partition table.
>   A. Norton Ghost, Partition Magic, and Ghod knows what other repair 
> utilities choke and die when faced with a corrupt MBR.
>   B. Having Ghost backups "safely" stored on both your wintel box and 
> your Samba server does you no good if you don't have the correct
driver 
> for your wintel box's NIC available when you need it. Luckily, I
didn't. 
> Won't happen again!
> 3. Backups at one-month intervals don't cut it. From now on, weekly at
a 
> minimum. Suggestions for automating the process are welcome.
I suggest you get Partition Magic 7 or 8. PQ 5 does not support Windows
XP NTFS.
Better still, download the Knoppix ISO and make a bootable CD. Knoppix
3.3 and 3.4 contain QTParted. For the most part, QTParted will give you
nearly the same services that Partition Magic does. On the plus side, it
supports all Linux file systems. On the minus side, some resizing
operations cannot be performed if they involve overlapping a partition
during copy. 
-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9
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