Should I delete my MBR?

[Oxygen]

I wish I'd asked this question before proceeding to do so. I've been having grub problems, every time I load it hangs on stage 1.5 and either gives me error 16 or error 25. I like to be clean so after a discussion on IRC I was completely clear in my mind what I had to do: Search Google. In my head I like to be a tidy person even though I can't be arsed to keep stuff clean, but I thought it'd good to just wipe the MBR, so if there's anything faulty it'll be gone. That worked a beauty. it wasn't until I rebooted into LiveCD and tried to find the partition I realised I'd done a stupid thing... See it didn't occur to me, being the person who knows little about file system and hard drive structure, that my MBR would have more than just what OS to boot written to it. It also has THE PARTITION TABLE!

I'd done this to both drives, my second being the one with all my important data on. This was a classic oh shi- moment. In desperation I thought I could restore the Windows MBR which would see my partitions and I'd be home free, but apparently hard drives aren't as simple as my mind would wish so I ended up on the recovery console running commands on a hard drive for partitions that don't exist. I live on the 3rd floor of my house and after this mountain of failure I was damn close to finding out what the terminal velocity of a hard drive is, or at least what happens when thrown onto paving slabs from 3 stories up. Panic set in, swear words were yelled, LiveCD was booted.

It wasn't too long ago that the partition table on my first hard drive corrupt loosing all my games, although a pain to reinstall I'd not lost all my years of data including programming, websites, game design and most importantly all my por...ous rock videos... which would of basicly meant I'd lost all work I'd ever done... ever... period... But I was lucky enough for that not to happen. After a discussion with some people on IRC who I'd now consider a bunch of phenomenal idiots I was told that all my data was simply gone and that I'd have better chance getting it back asking Jesus to remember what my hard drive looked like in binary and to restore it for me. So this time around when they were gone I was pretty devastated. Fortunately I have friends just as oblivious as me who told me I could restore my data. I felt very happy and quite anxious. Though that may of been the chocolate cake kicking in.

Either way after 5 minutes of Googling on my LiveCD, Kubuntu Gutsy for those interested (Nothing spectactual) I came across a treasure chest, filled with treasure chests, all containing gold! I'd found "Recovery is Possible", this godsend of a godsend is now my favourite LiveCD because on it is TestDisk which, after figuring out the simple but actually quite nice interface, I managed to load, search my hard drives and restore my partition table. I was estatic, almost more than when I first got ndiswrapper working all those years ago... seriously I'd just saved everything I have.

I was back where I started but after another attempt of me trying to make things better, they got worse. So from now on if I don't like something, I'm not touching it with with a 25 foot barge pole.

If anybody here ever has problems with their hard drives I recommend RIP alot, seriously, this thing is my baby along with my new monitor. Download it here (http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-r...looplinux/rip/) and it'll save your life... or partitions... more likely the latter.

That is all.

[HROAdmin26]

Hahahahahaha!

A great read, as I remember how I felt the same so many similar times.

Thanks for the info on the RIP CD as well!

[Jonathan183]

Hahahahahaha!

A great read, as I remember how I felt the same so many similar times.

Thanks for the info on the RIP CD as well!

If only computers had an 'undo I think I know what this will do' button which was good for at least 2 reboots ! I'll download the RIP CD while I still have internet access

[Oxygen]

You know that thing about Windows and Linux being different, Cars and motorbikes? I like the motorbike but it won't work.

Unfortunatly I still have that grub error and even after formatting my entire Linux drive I'm still getting that problem. For the time Being I'm gona have to go Linux-free for a while... otherwise I'll have no sanity left...

Back soon.

[Jonathan183]

You know that thing about Windows and Linux being different, Cars and motorbikes? I like the motorbike but it won't work.

Unfortunatly I still have that grub error and even after formatting my entire Linux drive I'm still getting that problem. For the time Being I'm gona have to go Linux-free for a while... otherwise I'll have no sanity left...

Back soon.

Have you tried the SuperGrubCD to see if you can sort it?

[Oxygen]

I haven't. I may try it... I'd like it to work...

Can you provide information?

[Jonathan183]

I haven't. I may try it... I'd like it to work...

Can you provide information?

You should find link in downloads ... utilities ... other ... current link Super Grub Disk 0.9590 - Linux Downloads Directory