Hi there, I am in the following situation: have a disk with many partitions. Everything except the MBR is ok. The MBR is full of 0's. There are "important" data on one of the partitions. The question is how to get them. There is a copy of the MBR on /dev/hda5 - one of the linux-partitions on the disk. I know the approximate size of the partitions and the order in which they stand in the partition table. So I thoght I can try to describe corectly the "situation" of /dev/hda5 in the partition table and then try to mount /dev/hda5 from a CD. But I do not know exactly the sizes and it's a lot of work to try to different combinations since everything have to be made by hand (I know just fdisk-program, which is interactive). Does smb knows some non-interactive program, or some other approach to the problem? Any help will be greatly appreciate. I'm sorry if this is not the right forum for this problem, but I do not know some better forum for this. I'll be happy if you have some hint about it too. thanks, gery

Well to get to your data you could boot off of a live cd (I recommend Feather Linux or Knoppix) and mount the partitions. You could then install grub onto one of them, (or if there's an old /boot directory in one of them, just use that as the root for grub) and then install the grub bootloader into the MBR. There's also live GRUB CD's and floppies you can make that provide you with a nice little grub menu/console that you can use to boot one of those parittions, assuming one has a /boot partition. Hope that helps!

Hi, I cannot mount the partition - it gives some error: wrong filesystem type or too many mounted filesystems. I can look precisely what the error it is. I tried: mount -t ext2 /dev/hda5 /mnt In /mnt I do not have anything mounted. I thought it gvies this error because it loooks at the MBR of the disk to mount the partition and the MBR of the disk is full of 0's. It's interesting how is it made if not so. I'll look precisely what it gives, but everything which relies on the partition table would not work. I do not know which software does not use the MBR to recognize the partition on the disk. Is the partition table the only place where it is said which part of the disk can be used for the different partitions? I'm not sure how the partition table is made, I suppose it just point to some place of the disk where the actual information about the filesystem stay. Are there some other things (I suppose not at the beginning of the disk) on which one can recognize where start one partition and where it ends? The partition-table is made under Windows. There is only one linux filesystem and it is made under linux.

you can try http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html testdisk-4.5.zip read the how to use at web site first. I have used it on my 120g hdd with 9 primary and 2 different extended volumes to get the info I needed . fat32 and ext3 partitions. If the MBR is all 0's and not just the partition table you will also need to run WIN98 fdisk/mbr , linix program to reload the grub or ?. There are other programs one is Partition Doctor.

testdisk did it :) Many Many THANKS. Thanks a lot TopFarmer.

thanks for letting us know.