I love you testdisk!

[Richard Shaw]

Just wanted to plug testdisk[1] in case others end up in the same situation.

I have F14 installed on my work laptop. IT doesn't really have a
problem with it but asked that I use NTLDR rather than grub (or use
NTLDR to bootstrap GRUB).

Somehow during the "dd"ing of the bootsector I messed up my partition
table and lost everything (or so I thought).

Using System Rescue CD I tried a few different things like:

- Resetting up the partition manually which failed as I couldn't
remember the exact geometry.
- Using sfdisk

Then I found a page online about testdisk. I wouldn't have thought by
the name it was what I was looking for but it turns out it's exactly
what I needed.

It was able to find and recover my XP partition (sda1) but Fedora was
gone. No big deal as I don't keep any important data on it so a fresh
install and I'm back in business.

I think where I went wrong was when I installed GRUB to the /boot
partition. I must have had a setting/option wrong.

Now I have NTLDR bootstrap loading GRUB and everything works as expected.

Richard

[1] http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk