On Aug 14, 2009, at 12:48 PM, Robert Nichols <rnicholsNOSPAM at comcast.net> wrote: > Ross Walker wrote: >> On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 5:00 AM, Chan Chung Hang >> Christopher<christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk> wrote: >> >> Question now is, was the first sector of partition 1 damaged (was it >> 63 or 64 sectors dd'd)? >> >> If so it will require a more tricky procedure to fix. > > No, the ext2 file system does not use the first 1K block of the > partition. > That space is left free for a boot loader. The first super block of > the > file system is the 2nd 1K block of the partition, and even if that > gets > overwritten it is easily recovered from one of the backup super > blocks. I did not know that, good information. So stage2 is written in first 1k of the partition? Ah but I believe the OP has the partition setup as a LVM PV. Question is does LVM leave the first 1k free for a stage2 boot loader? And if the LVM metadata is corrupt is there a second copy at the end of the PV? -Ross