Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2014 07:10:26 -0400 From: George Mitchell <george+freebsd@m5p.com> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Clobbered MBR partition table Message-ID: <534D13A2.9000706@m5p.com>
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My laptop has a hard disk I partitioned, whoops, I mean sliced, into four slices when I installed 8.2-STABLE on it a couple of years ago. The first, third, and fourth slices I reserved for future experiments, and most of the space went into the second slice where I installed 8.2-STABLE. Time went on and the second slice is currently running 9.2-STABLE, and I installed 10.0-PRERELEASE on the first slice late last year. But mostly I have been booting off the second slice, which means pressing enter at the initial F1/F2/F3/F4 boot prompt. Then last Friday I was preparing to update the first slice to the latest 10.0-STABLE. Things were going well until I rebooted and typed F1 at the boot prompt. I immediately got a second prompt offering me the options of second disk or PXE. At this point the machine was unbootable, as whatever I typed would cycle between the F1/F2/F3/F4 alternatives and the second disk/PXE alternatives. I hit ctrl-alt-delete and got told there was no bootable disk. So I got a new disk and plugged in into the laptop and started over again. (My first attempt was with a 10.0-RELEASE memstick image, but that's a subject for another day.) Out of conservatism, I have installed 8.4-STABLE on the new disk. Then the first thing I did was to hook up the old disk through a USB adapter and dump it with dd to a backup image. That's going to be finished in a couple of hours, at which point I hope to poke around on the old disk and repair what I assume is a clobbered master boot record partition table. My question is: What's the best tool to help reconstruct the partition table? I think my problem will be mostly solved if I can find the BSD labels on the old disk (which, by the way, has not exhibited any I/O errors during the "dd" backup process). Do BSD labels have a recognizable signature? Thanks for your help and attention. -- George
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