[H-GEN] Cleaning up the MBR on a /dev/hda

[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

On Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 11:54:08AM +1000, Ewan Edwards wrote:

> The best idea I've had so far is to somehow capture the partition 
> table information, then use dd as above, then somehow write the 
> captured information back.
> 
> Suggestions gratefully accepted for the 'somehow' steps.
> 

The sfdisk manpage says:

 -d     Dump the partitions of a device in a format useful as input to
        sfdisk. For example,
            % sfdisk -d /dev/hda > hda.out
            % sfdisk /dev/hda < hda.out
        will correct the bad last extended partition that the OS/2
        fdisk creates.

I believe that standard Linux fdisk has -lu options which would be similarly
useful.  It would probably be best to back up all your data, double-check the
backup, and use two different fdisk programs to record the partition locations
before making any changes.

Oh, and Googling says that the "dd bs=512" command you mentioned will not, in
fact, wipe the partition table, and such is my recollection (though I did get
burned trying to run that command once before).

Alternatively, boot from a rescue disk and install GRUB.
-- 
Jason Parker-Burlingham
<jasonp at panix.com>
(Watch this space)