Lost MBR writing image to USB drive with DD
Posted: 26 Feb 2015, 11:00
Hi folks... A few years back I managed to restore an entire disk with Testdisk I had accidentally lost executing the wrong DISKPART command. So after stumbling through a few approaches for correcting this current problem, I remembered to go back to Testdisk.
My problem started when I wrote an ISO Linux Mint LiveCD image to a USB flash drive with DD for Windows. The drive originally had GPT partition table written by gparted in Linux. After writing the image to the drive with DD for Windows, I booted it to install Mint onto another USB drive. Booted into Linux, gparted presented the following error message:
"Warning: /dev/sdc contains GPT signatures, indicating that it has a GPT table. However, it does not have a valid fake msdos partition table, as it should. Perhaps it was corrupted -- possibly by a program that doesn't understand GPT partition tables. "
Somewhere along the way in attempting to address the problem, the GPT data was lost. However after having Testdisk do a "Deeper Search" on the drive, it did find a backup FAT32 MBR at the end of the drive:
But I don't know enough about what is going here to feel confident of having Testdisk write the backup to the main partition table because of the enormous size of Linux partition that the deeper search also listed.
I'd really appreciate someones thoughts on whether or not it may be safe to write the backup partition table to the main one at this point. Here's the Testdisk log of the session: https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=2F2DE919 ... 6708E0!107.
Thanks
My problem started when I wrote an ISO Linux Mint LiveCD image to a USB flash drive with DD for Windows. The drive originally had GPT partition table written by gparted in Linux. After writing the image to the drive with DD for Windows, I booted it to install Mint onto another USB drive. Booted into Linux, gparted presented the following error message:
"Warning: /dev/sdc contains GPT signatures, indicating that it has a GPT table. However, it does not have a valid fake msdos partition table, as it should. Perhaps it was corrupted -- possibly by a program that doesn't understand GPT partition tables. "
Somewhere along the way in attempting to address the problem, the GPT data was lost. However after having Testdisk do a "Deeper Search" on the drive, it did find a backup FAT32 MBR at the end of the drive:
Code: Select all
1 * Linux 0 32 33 2867 181 2 46067712
2 P FAT32 LBA 3721 1 1 3910 254 63 3052287
I'd really appreciate someones thoughts on whether or not it may be safe to write the backup partition table to the main one at this point. Here's the Testdisk log of the session: https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=2F2DE919 ... 6708E0!107.
Thanks