[sllug-members]: OSS tools to fix WinXP partition

[Shaun Kruger]

> I'd start a little lower and check if the BIOS is detecting the
> harddrive.
>
> If it is just a bad MBR you might need to also (re)create the partition
> table.  Hopefully it was something simple -- the whole disk allocated to
> a single partition.  But depending on where he got the machine there
> might also be at least one more partition which is the "system
> diag/reinstall partition" the company (like dell) puts on..

In the case of a lost partition I'm also partial to the partition
recovery tools found in the util-linux package (there are two of
them).  A word of warning though...  They don't get built as part of
the standard util-linux build.  You have to go find them in the source
tree and run their individual make files.  I recovered a lost mbr that
way before.  They didn't get the primary/logical partitions exactly
the way they were before, but it produced a partition table that
worked well enough to get my data back.

Shaun

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