Date: 09/29/05 (Computer Geeks)    Keywords: linux, google

Google doesn't seem to be being very helpful, though I'm still looking.

The deal is: I have a drive where the boot sector seems to have gone bad. Attempting to access the only partition on the drive with Windows XP leads to the claim that the drive isn't formatted. According to the version of testdisk provided with Knoppix 3.7, the partition data is intact, but the boot sector does not have the magic number 0xAA55. As far as I can discern from Google, this is a Bad Thing.

My plan right now is to get another drive, create the same sized partition on it, and then dd if=/dev/hdb1 of=/dev/hdd1, which as far as I can tell should clone the contents of the partition onto the partition on the other drive, where that second drive ought to have a good boot sector (which that dd wont include).

However, I'm thinking that if I can just dump a new boot sector onto the drive, and use Linux fdisk to put the partition size data back in place, I ought to be able to get away with it without spending a chunk of my afternoon waiting for data to copy.

I suspect there's also a way to do it with testdisk, but I can't find simple instructions for that program -- yet. I will keep looking, though.

Any suggestions?

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/785373.html