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.