Sigh!

I have deleted the MBR. Yes i know, then everything is lost and unrepairable.

*BUT, the thing is that i have not yet booted my computer yet*.

When i do all will be gone forever, hda1, hda2, hda3, all of it. No harddisk recovery program will ever get the system back. I have (had?) a dualbootsystem that i have optimised for a half year or so. I feel sick when i think about it. But now everything works nice, i can access all partitions everything is still here, exept when i take a look on hda with qtparted. Then hda ofcourse is totally unreadable, because it tries to read from the actual master boot record (and not from memory and the post-booted info on disk.)

THE QUESTION :
Is there anyway that i can copy the data my computer is aware of right now when it still is unbooted and put it on the mbr? Something in the /boot folder? Anything that would make it possible to once more see that lovely Debian dualbootscreen once more? Can i make a startupdisk with the help of grub? And then copy the floppy to the hda bootblock?

How did this happend?
I was going to to copy a image of the mbr of my external drive to that very drive(sda1) but by fatal error i copied to hda. Adios partitions.

The limits of language fails to express how grateful i would be if someone could offer a glimpse of salvation out of this depressing mess.

Thanks for reading this,
Björn.

First backup your data to your external drive. Anything you do to try to recover your partition table risks losing everything. There are some tools that can try to guess and restore your partition table:

http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/76201/gpart/

Some of the hard drive manufacturers have utilities that also attempt to do so, eg maxtor:

http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/m...eHQ9bWJy&p_li=

None of this stuff is foolproof, so backup first.

Another thing to try. Open a console and run:

# cfdisk /dev/hdx

where 'x' corresponds to the foobared drive. If cfdisk sees the partitions correctly, select the "Write" option from the bottom menu(navigate with the arrow keys). This should force a rewrite of the partition table to the mbr as cfdisk sees it. Also, copy down all the cfdisk data; it might come in handy when using other utilities to try and recover the partition table.

After you get the partition table installed/rewritten you will probably have to reinstall grub. I don't know grub so I can't help you there. Check out man grub-install for help.

If you only wrote over the mbr then it's really just a matter of restoring the mbr. Use a your Knoppix cd to boot the system and when it asks what to boot instruct it to boot from the partition where the Debian kernel is located. Once back in the Debian system you can restore the boot loader. Providing you have not messed with the partition table it should be fine.

I would download a mepis cd. It has a grub install option in the control center. I did the same, (I still don't know what I did,) but I was able to use the mepis cd to install a working grub mbr.

This cd works great for fixing a botched xconfig file as well.

Jim