MBR apparently overwritten!

[Dmitri Nikulin]

On 4/9/06, Petr Janda <elekktretterr at xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hey,
>
> Something freaky has happened. My 3rd disk's partitions are gone. I had a 1)
> HURD 2) Windows 3) DragonFly. Now wanting to play some games i went to boot
> WIndows and i found out the DragonFly partition is now covering the whole
> disk. Does MBR have a modification timestamp? If yes, how to retrieve it? If
> no, what can i do?

This is your punishment for gaming instead of coding :)

However, it's recoverable. If the partitions themselves are not
destroyed, all you need to do is re-create them with their EXACT
offsets (and, to be safe, sizes) that they had before. Type codes,
etc. help but are not fundamentally necessary, depending on how you'll
be using them.

I'm not sure how DragonFly booted if it thought its partition started
at the beginning of the disk, but was actually later. This should not
work... are you absolutely CERTAIN that the boot option list is
correct for that hard disk? In particular, are you looking at the
partition list for the 1st disk for booting, but the 3rd disk when
identifying this problem?

Booting off a livecd and dumping the fdisk and disklabel output for
all your drives might help the rest of us determine the problem. You
may even identify the real problem yourself just by looking through
the outputs.

  -- Dmitri Nikulin