[SLL] I can't find the start of my ext3 FS

[Brian Lane]

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Darius Medhora wrote:
> Hi,
> I have a situation where my 50G partition just refuses to mount or fsck.
> I really don't want to loose the files on it so let me start by explaining
> what happened.
> I wiped out the first 512 bytes of the disk by mistake and therefore I 
> lost the partition table of my disk.
> I ran testdisk from knoppix to recreate the partitions however, testdisk
> could not recreate 1 of them. This is the partition thats giving me 
> problems. Can any one give me any solution to this please? Details of
> disk follow:-
> 

How are you sure that the recreated partitions are correct? Did you have
a printout of them? Just using their sizes may not work, you need to
have a record of the exact start and end locations.

If you can, I'd backup this whole disk to another drive using dd to copy
the raw device data. Backups are always a Good Thing(TM)!

There *may* be a copy of the MBR in /boot -- depending on which
bootloader and distribution you are using. I haven't seen one with grub
but I seem to remember that lilo used to back it up before writing
itself to the MBR.

Good Luck!

Brian

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