Retrieve deleted MBR

A a major mistake has happened while attempting to clear out the MBR of one of the hard disks of my machine. Instead of clearing out the MBR of the target hd I have cleared out the MBR of my TrueCrypt encrypted storage hd by using:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdx bx=512 count=1

Unfortunately I have no backup of the MBR. If I had one I would not have to write this post. ;)

Is there any possibility to restore/retrieve the original MBR that I have deleted, so that I can write it back to the hd?
Since the hd is encrypted I need to get the original MBR back. But how?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by gcx

A a major mistake has happened while attempting to clear out the MBR of one of the hard disks of my machine. Instead of clearing out the MBR of the target hd I have cleared out the MBR of my TrueCrypt encrypted storage hd by using:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdx bx=512 count=1

Unfortunately I have no backup of the MBR. If I had one I would not have to write this post. ;)

Is there any possibility to restore/retrieve the original MBR that I have deleted, so that I can write it back to the hd?
Since the hd is encrypted I need to get the original MBR back. But how?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

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Hello,

For basic file systems (not encrypted), you can use any live distro that includes the program 'testdisk' This is included in "Ubuntu Rescue Remix" which is a nice command line recovery distro.

testdisk is pretty simple to use, IMO, but there's plenty of info on google if you need additional help.

You may also have to use a partition tool such as parted to set the boot flag on the partition that contains your boot loader.