[CentOS] Now you did it Olly

Sun Jul 27 15:44:57 UTC 2008
Ned Slider <ned at unixmail.co.uk>

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.