You've rendered your system unbootable, you need some sort of boot CD. Gentoo, Knoppix, DSL, it doesn't matter so much what but you have to boot something because your boot sector was wiped hence cannot boot.
Last edited by Corona688; 02-21-2011 at 10:14 PM..
Today I have time to generate KNOPPIX usb flash based linux system. I boot the system using the flash based KNOPPIX linux. I use the command to scan the whole disk (160G) for backup.img file:
grep -i -a -B10 -a100 'backup.img' /dev/sda > sdc1/myRecovertFile.txt
I am now waiting for the result. If I am luck, I may find the backup.img file and recover the FAT for /dev/sda... Crossing my finger...
After several minutes, the command stop with info:
grep: /dev/sda: Cannot allocate memory
and generate binary file myRecoveryFile.txt with size 500303...
That's not how grep works... or how FAT works, for that matter... The name and the contents are never in the same place.
You'd be better off looking for the string "FAT16" or "FAT32" in the drive with a hex editor. That'll help you find where the FAT partition begins.
---------- Post updated at 11:36 PM ---------- Previous update was at 11:30 PM ----------
Here's what my FAT32 USB drive looks like:
...so you can see my FAT32 partition begins at offset 003f0000. The partition table this translates to:
---------- Post updated at 11:37 PM ---------- Previous update was at 11:36 PM ----------
That start number is related:
---------- Post updated at 11:49 PM ---------- Previous update was at 11:37 PM ----------
Then, if you know the offset of your vfat partition you can (as a special -o loop trick) mount part of a disk, letting you get at it without altering your partition table!
Thank you for your example. It looks there exist chance that I can find the backup.img file content if I understand the file storage methodology...
The file was stored in ext3 partition of /dev/sda. Even the FAT lost, I remember that, the first primary partition is ACER hidden recovery partition, the second primary partition is the C: drive, about 20G. The third partition is extention partition with several logical partitions. I remember I have NTFS data drive about 80G, NTFS paging partition about 10G, linux root partition about 10G, swap about 1G, one data partition for vmware, and one data partition for my personal data. The backup.img file should be under the root partition...
---------- Post updated at 11:01 PM ---------- Previous update was at 10:50 PM ----------
First, the output of
is
The last line is what I expect...
Gnnngh, that makes it a lot harder. There's no easy string to hunt for for ext3. I've compared dumps of three ext3 partitions and they have nearly nothing in common.
---------- Post updated at 12:55 AM ---------- Previous update was at 12:16 AM ----------
There's still the shotgun approach though. Try every possible partition starting location (cylinder). There's only a few thousand. But I can't figure out how to translate cylinders into sectors; there seems to be no rational pattern. It certainly doesn't seem to follow the 16065 units it illustrates when you list with fdisk -ul so I don't know how to generate them in a loop to try with that mount command. Maybe someone here does?
I just found that, the GNU software TestDisk may help me to find partitions. And it was said belong to KNOPPIX linux distribution. I will try it tonight...
---------- Post updated at 10:41 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:39 PM ----------
Log of using testdisk
1. reboot system using KNOPPIX.
2. link NTFS lib:
3. run testdisk
4. Choose the disk, [Proceed]
5. Choose [Intel ]
6. Choose [Analyse ]
which is expected...
7. choose [Proceed ]
8. Less than 3 second, TestDisk found my all partitions (not include extended partition, but include all logical partition). Hit ENTER.
9. Choose [Write ]
10. Hit [Y].
11. Choose [OK].
12. Choose [Quit ], and [Quit ].
13. reboot system.
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