On Tue, 2007-05-15 at 21:53 +0100, Piers Kittel wrote: > Hello all, > > I work for a very tiny charity. I was given 2 Dell Dimension 1100 > computers with Debian installed originally, used as test machines. > Their hard drives were wiped on purpose by an external company (long > story, that I'm not too fully aware of) and I was told to try and > recover the (luckily not too critical) data. Taking the first > computer, when starting it up, it showed a GRUB error message. I > booted up Knoppix, downloaded TestDisk, recovered the partitions, > restored from superblock backup and ran fsck. It repaired all > errors, and put all recovered folders in lost+found. I moved all > folders back to where they were and renamed them. I then rebooted > and first machine worked perfect. Taking the second machine, on boot > up, it showed five random characters (always the same one every time > though) and stopped there. Did the same procedure with the first > machine, used Knoppix, recovered the partitions, restored from > superblock, used fsck, and moved all folders to where they were. I > rebooted, but got the same 5 random characters. I figured they wiped > the MBR in the second machine, while they didn't with the first one. > Don't know why. Anyway, rebooted into Knoppix, ran GRUB and then > used the following commands as root: > > root (hd0,0) > setup (hd0) > quit > > It installed everything OK, and everything passed, with no error > messages. Seemed to work OK. I rebooted, and this time, I can see > random characters flash rapidly upwards on the screen and then it > stops with a line on the bottom, with "PCMP" and then 4 gibberish > characters (of which one is a smiley face) and then "DELL Dell > DE051" and nothing else. I've tried reinstalling GRUB a few times to > no avail. I suspect the MBR is a bit flakey, and needs wiping, but > everything that I could find about wiping the MBR also claims will > wipe the partitions which makes me a little nervous. Wiping the MBR only removes the partition table, not the partitions themselves. In other words, you can wipe out the partition information, then recreate the partitions exactly as they were, and all your data will still be there. > How do I fix > GRUB so I can boot Debian again? I can access and mount the hard > drive via Knoppix fine and can read all data on there. > > BTW when the BIOS splash screen shows, I get a "Dell DE051 series" > above the loading bar which sort of explains the "Dell DE051" part > when the BIOS tries to find a bootloader. > > Any ideas how I can fix the MBR without having to buy a second hard > drive and move all data off, and wipe the first one? from knoppix, do: # take note of all the partition info cfdisk /dev/hda # wipe MBR dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda count=512 # recreate your partitions exactly as they were cfdisk /dev/hda However, you might also want to use a disk utility of some sort (badblocks, Seagate's Seatools, or whatever) to verify that the hard drive isn't bad. -davidc -- gpg-key: http://www.zettazebra.com/files/key.gpg
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