[TriLUG] OT: Dell desktop, recovering boot and partition info

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

On Mon, 31 Aug 2009, Joseph Mack NA3T wrote:

just an FYI...

As I said previously I mounted the partitions, and copied 
the ntfs directories of interest (Documents and Settings) to 
an ext3 fs (thus loosing permissions etc, but what the hell, 
the user still got the files).

You'd think with a mounted fs that I could calculate the 
block start and end and dd it off to somewhere. The copy to 
a file on disk was intractable with `mount -o 
loop,offset=?`. I made another dd copy to a bare disk but 
that was unreadable too. I have no idea why not.

The disk itself gave 0'ed out values for heads and cylinders 
(255,63) and wasn't resetable with fdisk (no idea why not, I 
assume without much basis, that this may have something to 
do with why the disk went bad in the first place).

So I got the files off, but can't reset CHS and have given 
up on trying to fix the partition table.

Thanks for your help people

Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
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