[ubuntu-uk] Disk Rescue!

[Traveller]

On 30/08/2010 12:24, daveg at boavon.plus.com wrote:
> Many thanks for the various pieces of advice.
>
> Have just finished booting up an old WIN98 setup CD, using the F8 key
> managed to get to a shell prompt where it had loaded a few utils into a
> RAMDISK.  FDISK /STATUS showed some partitions.  Deleteing them appeared
> to work, but then when trying to write a new partition it just hung again.
>   Re-booted and tried again. Similarly the status still showed the
> partitions being there - even though I thought I had deleted them.
> Realised, they were just marked for deletion and cos the new partition
> hadn't worked they were still there.  This time I deleted and then exited
> from FDISK only to receive a disk write error.
>
> All similar symptoms to other methods used so far.
>
> Conclusion:-  Either the disk is well and truly busted OR for reasons I
> cannot explain or fix is that the MBR is opened read-only and it is busted
> also.
>
> Is'nt there some form of low-level utility which would merely zap the disk
> with zeros or something regardless whether it has some form of protection
> on it?  I don't need the data and I don't need any software - I can
> install o/s afterwards.
>
> Lessons for others to learn: - if you haven't backed up your MDR and/or
> taken an image of your disk and it is important to you - do it regularly
> before it is too late.
>
>
>
If you can get to the WinXP Recovery Console, the info at 
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/bootcons_fixmbr.mspx?mfr=true 
may help.