Hello

did the biannual windows reinstall and lost bootmanager GRUB of course. Upon doing grub-install /dev/sdb1 (wrong drive, it seems :S) I broke my NTFS drive (I have several drives, one for files one for os, and i broke the file one). Now it is unreadable both by LINUX and Windows.

Anyone have any ideas? I've tried using the supergrub tool to restore, but I don't really know how it works. Is there any way to undo this damage? I realize formatting it is an option and then recovering all files, but I don't trust that it will work.

This overwrites the boot-sector record of the partition. If this was NTFS - erk !!!
Try fixboot from recovery console from the Windoze CD. Might work, might not.
Grub can overwrite several sectors, and fixboot doesn't always repair them all.

Else you're probably up for a re-install - of at least the system; DLLs, exe's ... that sort of thing.

i thought the mbr was the first 64 kb of a disk.

how does messing with that make the rest of the disk un-readable ?

if anything it should be able to be used for storage but not booting.

what am i missing ?

You're right, messing the MBR shouldn't have any impact on the partitions, but in this case GRUB wasn't installed in the MBR, but on a partition : And that does mess up a partition...

Serafean

Moved: This thread is more suitable in General and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

Mod Note: As this is more of a Windows-related question I'm moving it to General

The MBR is the first 512 bytes of the drive--AKA sector #0
The first 512 bytes of a partition is sometime called the boot sector.

Regardless of what boot code is in the MBR, windows also has boot code in the boot sector of its partition. So putting GRUB there stops Windows from booting.

Typically, the first partition does not start until sector 63. Sectors 1-62 can contain boot code but are often just empty.

I don't know much about grub. But I can tell you something that might help you get your files back.
Look up "photorec". This is a useful tool indeed. You may be able to recover your data.

thanks for the explanation, but i am still lost on how hacking the mbr/ boot sectors can brick a hard drive. i know he can no longer boot into windows but how does that make the partitions un-mountable in linux ?

hi, i have the same situation here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...0/#post2958726

but it is not bricked; maybe we have different definitions of what bricked is ?