MBR corrupt on storage drive of images
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I have several images that are stored on a portable hard drive that I was going to back up today. I plugged it in and it game me a message about needing to be formatted. I tried to repair the mbr but that did not work but I was able to pull the images off of the drive with a linux based machine. What are the chances that the images are fine and not damaged at all?
It really depends… If it's a hardware issue, you'd better to copy the images to another hard drive ASAP.
If the MBR you mentioned is for boot loader, it's not a problem. If it's for partition table, maybe you can use testdisk to fix that completely.
If it's file system issue, maybe you will have a chance to use fsck to fix that…
Good luck!
Steven.
I got all the data copied off the drive when I was able to access it through another OS. No the mbr was not a boot loader. The drive I had storing the images was just a usb external hard drive formatted in NTFS. It was something to do with the partition table I think as it kept asking me to format the drive. Unfortunately in my haste and frustration once I got the data off it I just formatted the drive and didnt run testdisk on it :( If it was just a issue with the partition table the data contained on the partition should be fine, right? Im assuming that if it was in fact a file system issue it would have prompted me to repair the files right away, correct?
"a file system issue" -> If so, partclone, which clonezilla uses, will just exit. Or you can enter expert mode, check "-fsck-src-part" option.
Steven.
Im sorry Im not sure if I follow. Are you saying that if it was in fact a file system issue, when and if I try to use clonezilla to restore a image to a drive, clonezilla will just exit if there is a file system issue with the image it is restoring?
This was not a bootable drive. Just an single partition external hd storing the image files for several computers. The disk showed up as RAW in windows so I am under the assumption that the partition table was damaged. Is there any chance that the disk images stored on the hd are undamaged if the partition table was damaged?
I am not fully understand your question, so here I am just trying to answer you.
If you have saved an image for your partition, then it's nothing to do with partition table is corrupt or not. You can rebuild the partition table then restore the image on the destination partition.
If you mean the disk where you stored the image is damaged on the partition table, maybe you can try a program called "testdisk" to fix the partition table. You can find "testdisk" on Clonezilla live.
Steven.