Recover stupid mistake

[Tom H]

On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 5:00 PM, Aaron Konstam <akonstam at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-05-27 at 08:07 -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>> On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 13:32:51 +0100,
>>   Mike Martin <redtux1 at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> > Hi when I was trying (and failing) to get a bootable pen-drive, with
>> > the F13 live image I accidentally did the following
>> >
>> > dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1
>> >
>> > which returned nearly immediately and now I have no data on the disk.
>> >
>> > The disk is 750 gig , of which about 400 is used. I am hoping that
>> > only the partition table is gone, if not is there any way to recover
>> > from my disaster
>>
>> I believe that command just changed the first 512 bytes. If you know how
>> it was partitioned you can probably get things back by making a new
>> partition table.
>
> The MBR and the partition tablrhave been destroyed. If you know what the
> partition table looked like fdisk can restore it. Restoring grub might
> also restore the MBR.

You can try to use gpart to determine the partition boundaries and
sizes and then use fdisk to restore them.