you gotta help me here :-(

L

leedude

New Member
I think i may have just screwed up my windows hard drive.
my layout:
SATA: 250GB Dedicated to Linux
ATA: 60GB Dedicated to Windows

a simple, yet badly chosen linux command:
dd if=hang.bin of=/dev/sdb

DISASTER!!!

It appears i have just messed the first 512 bytes of my windows hdd :eek:

I had some really important stuff on that disk, i should probably be more careful.

The explanation:
I have been messing around trying to learn about 386 assembly, and am trying to do a bootstrap from my usbdisk. with this tutorial http://www.nondot.org/sabre/os/files/Booting/nasmBoot.txt
i assumed(previous experience) that the usb disks block was /dev/sdb. BUT, it seems this was my ATA hard drive with windows on it(which is weird, cos i thought it would be hda or something cos its not serial).
so, in the process of trying to do a low level binary copy of a 512b file to a usb drive, i have accidentally copied it over the first 512bytes of my windows disk.
no, the disk is recognised in QTParted as having no format, and it says partition non existant when i try and boot windows.
as i understand it, the first 512mb is the boot record, so im hoping i could replace it.

please...can somebody help! where can i get a new 512bytes of an NTFS Partition??
or is there some kind of NTFS recovery program for linux?

Any help will be GREATLY appreciated.
 
That does seem very weird. the sata would likely be sda and the ata hda.

It does pay to have a backup of the partition tables especially when playing around with dd...

Not sure of the the best, or any easy way to fix :(
 
hmm....id say before you do anything drastic, grab the important files on the windows HDD and back those suckas up.
 
you should have ran fdisk -l to find the right /dev/whatever your usb flash drive was. if you want to make a bootable usb drive make sure it is capable of booting put syslinux on there and try booting it. you can saerch your model to see if anyone else has gotten it to boot. some flash drive cannont boot.

you can reinstall the windows boot loader thru the install CD in the Recovery Console.
 
w00t!
fixed it, i was able to recover the partition table with gpart.
then, i rebuilt it with fdisk.
it WORKS!!!!!!!!!
thanks for suggestions.
 
The is good to hear.

Still confusing about what happened initially tho.

You should try a fdisk -l to see what drives are listed...
 
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