[CentOS] Now you did it Olly

Sun Jul 27 17:02:08 UTC 2008
Robert Moskowitz <rgm at htt-consult.com>

Ned Slider wrote:
> 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. 
Kind of figured that. Where I missed the beat was at the bootloader 
install. I was NOT paying attention.....

And I am off to Europe with no helpdesk contact info. And I only get to 
my office (I am in Detroit, my office outside of Harrisburg PA) once a 
quarter. So I am trying to contact a colleague in the local office to 
get me the tech support guy. He straighted out the boot loader on this 
box once when the auto encypt install failed....

Thanks anyway gang.