[TriLUG] screwed disk

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

On Thu, 5 Apr 2007, jason at monsterjam.org wrote:

> http://forums.xandros.com/viewtopic.php?p=191912
> will tell the story sofar.. now Ive got a totally unusable computer..

hosed both disks or just the xandros disk?

> any suggestions?

the files on the xandros disk are still there. You need to 
get a partition table onto the xandros disk. Once you've 
found the partition info, you can partition the disk with 
fdisk. You do not need to put a boot loader onto that disk - 
you can boot off a grub or lilo floppy for the moment.

hmm, just noticed Alan Porter posting the same info in his 
reply, well won't go into details then

To get the partition info... Did you do the default install 
with Xandros? If so, how does it partition your disk? (you 
may have to go get another disk of identical size to find 
out). If not do you have a favourite size for /, swap....?

Before you mess with your disk, make a dd copy of it.

Let's say you had /,swap and /usr. You know that / begins at 
1 and /usr ends at the end.

Make a guess for the end of the the / partition and only 
make that partition. Mount it (ro) - see if you can see 
anything sensible in the directory listing.

Alan - what are you going to see if you partition / into 
the swap area - are you going to see junk directory 
entries? What if your partition is short?

btw: always keep a copy of the partition table of every disk 
(and keep it not only on that disk)

dd if=/dev/hda of=mbr.machine_name.OS_name.disk_name.date 
bs=512 count=1

Once a month as a cron job at 3am (or sometime when the 
machine isn't doing anything), with the disk mounted, on 
each partition, I also do

dd=/dev/zero of=zero.zero

the process will terminate when the partition is full and 
the next line of the cron job should delete the file 
zero.zero If you ever need to inspect the disk, you should 
have lots of x00000000's on places that aren't files.

Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!