10 Dec 2003, 20:30, Jasen Betts (3:640/1042), wrote to Pascal Schmidt:

Hi Jasen.

 JB> I trashed the wrong hard drives poartition table last month...
 JB> kept me bust for one rainy saturday and I learned stuff too,
 JB> on sunday I discovered the Partition_table_recovery_mini_howto 
 JB> (pretty much waht I did) and gpart.

This is _ONE_ place where I have to _like_ the Windows way of sloppily
copying whatever is in RAM to fill cluster space when writing files to the
drive.  Whenever a customer has lost a partition table, I've always managed
to find 20 to 50 copies of all or parts of it scattered all over the HD. 
That has been a real lifesaver more times than I can count.

I usually copy about four of those segments to a floppy then compare them. 
Whichever is the majority I copy back as the MBR and 90% of the time I've
gotten a good boot with no further editing needed.

Same with the BPB and the Root directory, as those are most often 'in
memory' when the system is in use.


     Good luck...  M.

--- Msged/386 TE 06 (pre)