Re: Help! Messed up my MBR part 2
In <[🔎] 199702231003.LAA28579@xs2.xs4all.nl>, Gertjan Klein <gklein@xs4all.nl> writes:
>hutch@shimoda.ena-east.ericsson.se (Brian Hutchinson) wrote:
>
> > Here is some more information on my sad state!
I'm coming into this late. Mail me if any of this does not make sence!!
I'm assuming MS-DOS was on your primary C: drive partition.
>[All information zapped...]
>
>>From what you've written, I gather that you inadvertedly told LILO to
>overwrite the boot sector (_not_ the MBR) of your DOS partition. DOS
>keeps some important bookkeeping information in it's boot sector, among
>which the size of the partition, the number of sectors in a cluster,
>etc. LILO has overwritten this information, so DOS can no longer boot
>from this partition.
>
>I know of no easy solution to this problem. There are no tools that I
>know of, that rebuild a DOS bootsector without also destroying all
>information on the partition. The simplest thing to do is to reformat
>the DOS partition,
Jesus christ!!!! I can't believe I'm hearing this from a Linux group!
Never, never format! Guys, come on!
I've been through losing FAT and HPFS boot sectors several times.
If your MBR is shot, the only thing I ever needed the do was ms-dos fdisk:
'fdisk /mbr'
I would leave this as a last resort, as a I do not know exactingly what it
does.
Boot sectors can be a little tricky if you do not have a copy (I now keep
copies : > )
FAT is a alot easier then HPFS. This would work out best....format a
partition that is the very close in size to your C: drive.
Lets say it's partiton 6
you would then read out that bootsector (sda scsi drive, hda IDE drive)
dd if=/dev/sda6 of=bootsec.bin bs=512 count=1
now write that to the C: drive (normally partition 2. Check with linux
fdisk)
dd if=bootsec.bin of=/dev/sda2 bs=512 count=1
At this point you MAY be able to boot the C:. If not you should be able to
use a DOS boot floppy and access the C:. You should then be able to do a :
sys a: c:
to bootstrap the C: drive.
This is assuming you can somehow get to Linux and dd.
If you have to, you can even use a floppy disks bootsector to get you going,
but you would have to edit it first with a hex edit to correct the size (if
I remember correctly).
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dave 'Kill a Cop' Cinege (aka Psychopath #3) --- Super Genius at Large
"Shelter me from the powder in the finger......Cover me from the thought
that pulled the trigger..." Neil Young
http://www.psychosis.com/
Libertarian Party 1-800-682-1776 http://www.lp.org/
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