[lug] Partitions hosed! Can't boot from floppy

[John Karns]

On Sat, 16 Jun 2001, Mike McCallister said:

> I'm assuming the system is completely hosed and I'll have to start over,
> but I'm hoping to use some DOS-based data recovery tools to pull some of my
> data off the drive. If only I could get to an A:\ prompt!
>
> Powerquest's tech support seems clueless (it took three messages to
> convince them I couldn't boot to floppy!), and SuSE support hasn't answered
> yet.
>
> Any thoughts greatly appreciated. Thanks!

There are a few disk / data rescue programs out there on the 'net that you
could take a look at.  Check your favorite search engine.  One that I have
taken a look at in the past is called "Hard Drive Mechanic", which has a
demo of some kind available which you can DL.  That might give you some
idea of what chance you have for success.  You might also try booting from
the SuSE install CD and type 'manual' at the first prompt.  Then follow
the menus to boot into rescue mode.  Then try running "fdisk -l" to see
what fdisk can make of your partition table; although I doubt you'd have
much success, you might be able to use the dd command to get some of the
data.  It would be in a form roughly equivalent to those .chk files that
MS scandisk creates, which is to say that it wouldn't be nicely packaged
discreet files but raw form which you would then have to put into files as
desired.

Although with a hosed partition table, you're in for a struggle.  It's
always a good idea to (in addition to backing up any important
partitions!) save the boot sector to floppy before running any program
which will modify it - 'dd if=/dev/hda of=myBootsect.img bs=512 count=1'.
Then 'mcopy myBootsect.img a:'.  That way you should be able to boot from
a rescue CD and at least have a fighting chance at recovering your system.

Good luck

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John Karns                                              jkarns at csd.net