Robert Moskowitz wrote:
Craig White wrote:
On Sun, 2008-07-27 at 10:36 -0400, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
Oh, Boy. I am in trouble now....
I just installed Centos on a USB drive on my corp notebook. To not TOUCH my corp drive.
I spent time with the drive partitioner to make sure that nothing was done to the internal hard drive...
Well I missed something and I overwrote the encrypted bootloader on the hard drive.
Now what? Can I rescue things?
I am leaving for my flight in a couple hours to Dublin for IETF meeting. I have to get this working on my own.
I hope there is another copy of the old boot loader somewhere on that system and some way to copy it?????
Nope
whose bootloader was it? Microsoft? You can re-install by booting installation CD and going to recovery console and running 'fixmbr'
Yes. XP. But with the corp encrypted bootloader....
No install CD. Well I do have an XP install CD here. Also Ghost 9.0 that has some sort of bootloader fixer?
I seem to recall that there are two copies of either the bootloader or partition table, one as a backup? But which is it?
Nope, I don't believe there is a backup of the mbr anywhere - that it the partition table that has two copies.
Interestingly, the recent mbr boot sector virus doing the rounds last year made a backup copy of the mbr at sector 62, so if you'd happened to have been infected then you could have recovered your original mbr from that, but I guess you're out of luck.
You haven't lost any data thought, just your ability to boot. A trip to corporate IT may be in order.