Re: Can I restore my MBR?

>
> I thought I had disk problems, so booted from a rescue CD (actually USB) 
> to see if I could run fsck. I didn't run fsck,

 
Alarm bells are ringing here. Why did you not run fsck by the way?
 

> but did mount the various 
> partitions for a look, and run fdisk -l, etc. When I rebooted, the 
> comptuer tells me it can't find it's hard drive. I assume something I 
> did destroyed the MBR. 

If all you did was read information from the drive, while not impossible, 
it is extremely unlikely that something was written by accident. But given 
that most rescue systems come up in root it could have.
 

> Maybe I'm wrong. I was pretty sure I did nothing 
> which should write to the disk, but I'm assuming on the evidence that 
> I'm wrong. 
>
Okay again you say you don't think you wrote to your disk - you're probably 
right, you most likely would remember any actions to write to the disk.

My question is whether there is a way of restoring the MBR from a copy 
> stored elsewhere?

Do you have a copy of your MBR to restore from? That's crazy paranoid if 
you do, but I like it!
 

> A meta-question is whether I'm mis-diagnosing the 
>
This brings me back to my alarm bells combined with this comment: "I 
thought I had disk problems,"

Why do you go from thinking you were developing disk problems to thinking 
you destroyed your MBR?

Steps I would take would be to boot into the rescue system, do the checks 
you did last time fdisk -l etc and verify whether you get the same results, 
but this time I would continue through to the fsck step also whether or not 
the information you receive is the same with the other checks.

After that I'm not too sure it still could be hardware or mbr problems but 
given how you thought you were developing disk problems there must have 
been a reason for why you thought that, and given what you said it seems 
more likely.

In any case you seem to be proceeding with a very wise step of backing up 
your stuff that's the main thing to get done.

Keep us posted

-- 
Irish Linux Users Group
--- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ILUG" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].
To post to this group, send an email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/a/linux.ie/group/ilug/.
To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/a/linux.ie/d/msgid/ilug/38d11589-6310-43eb-92a8-d47c634c88e2%40linux.ie.