Saturday July 01, 2006
It's a miracle I post something here. This blog is so neglected.
I got a new PC with a legitimate copy of Windows. I played around with it for a while. This "play around" meant that I also played some World of Warcraft. That included installing it and downloading a HUGE patch from the Internet and getting it configured nicely with addons and such. Eventually, I wanted to install Gentoo. I tried copying things over from a vmware instance, as I've been able to do with other systems. I had things copied and I ran grub. Well, I must have not installed grub correctly because it did some very weird things on reboot. So, I wanted to just get rid of GRUB and simply start over, maybe building Gentoo from scratch. So, I ran a familiar command to nuke the master boot record, writing the first 512 bytes of the disk with zeros:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
The outcome of that was surprising, because now my computer couldn't boot at all, and after booting with a rescue cd, I found that my partition table was ruined. Apparently, my partition table was part of the first 512 bytes! The obligatory, "that was weird, I've never had that happen to me" thought came. Then the "uh, you're going to have to reinstall from scratch, because you have no clue about what your partition table was like." thought came.
I didn't want to reinstall. Besides the amount of time getting WoW going, there were several other things that made me not want to spend another day getting this box back up to speed. So, I decided to try to figure out how to make the partitions somehow.
If you want to know how I solved this, read on.
Continue reading "Lost partition table? Bah."
