Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 23:41:44 +0900 From: "Jarrod O'Flaherty" <jofsama@yahoo.com> To: <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Help with lost MBR on USB HDD Message-ID: <000001c641f5$443eb0f0$040ba8c0@HAPLO> In-Reply-To: <20060305211729.EB6F716A430@hub.freebsd.org>
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For anyone who might be interested... > Jarrod O'Flaherty wrote: > > > And last but not least, I really hope someone can tell me how I can > > salvage my MBR & other 3 partitions. If that is not possible, then > > perhaps you can point me in the direction of a tool which will salvage > > the files on the lost slices? There's not heaps of data there, only > > around 20 GB or so across all three. But if I can, I'd really like to > > get it back. I'm hoping NTFS is robust enough to allow salvaging like > > this? > > > > Any and all help GREATLY appreciated!! > > > > Thankyou, > > Jarrod. > > I know you do not want to hear this, but why on earth did you > attempt to mess with the HD without a full backup in place first? > > I am not sure if you can recover the lost data. If not, this would be a > good time to wipe the disk clean and partition it to your liking. I > believe that you will have to install Windows before > installing FreeBSD. > > Good Luck! > -- > Gerard > I've done a lot of reading the last couple of days into the MBR and the like. Have to say it's a tad tough going, but quite a bit of fun at the same time. ;) Gerard, yes, this would be a good opportunity to wipe it and start again. If only it wasn't for those MP3s. ;) For those who couldn't read my last email because it was rather a bit too long, the short of it is that FDISK fried my USB HDD's MBR when I asked it to change a partition type's from NTFS to FreeBSD. Why did this happen? Does anyone have a large (blank!) USB HDD that they could experiment with? It would be great to see if this problem is replicable on FreeBSD. If so, I would suggest that a PR needs to be raised against FDISK. For anyone in the distant future who perhaps has trouble with their MBR and/or partitions I've found a stack of great literature on the web I'd be more than happy to post up. Also, tools that you might be interested in in order to "investigate" things are: - dskprobe.exe (WinNT / XP "Support Tool" for hex viewing disk) - dd (Data [File] dumping tool in Linux / BSD) - hd (Pretty print tool -- used with dd it apparently gets similar results to Dskprobe.exe) - gpart (Partition search and retrieval tool -- not yet tried myself) - part.exe (Ranish Partition Manager tool -- runs under DOS) They would be the main ones thus far. Anyone know of anything else I should be checking out? As it is, now that I am armed to the teeth, I hope to find out how much damage my USB HDD suffered, and then hopefully patch up the MBR and/or Logical Drives I lost. Keep you all posted. Cheers, Jarrod.
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