Re: [Clonezilla-live] How to recover partition table w/out restoring rest of disk?

[Jorge F. <jor...@gm...>]

On Wednesday 05 August 2009 07:25:02 pm Kevin W. Wall wrote:
> ONLY RESTORE THE PARTITION TABLE, but NOT any of the partitions.

It's been a while since I used Clonezila but if I remember correctly, when you 
perform the cloning...in the directory where the actual image is stored, 
there will be a file called sda-mbr (assuming sda drive).  That's the Master 
Boot Record (first 512 bytes of drives) and the last 64 bytes there contains 
the actual partition table.  You need to boot with a Live CD (I guess you can 
use Clonezilla and bring up the shell) and do this:

# If you have a USB jump drive put in...so we can backup the current MBR
# just in case...
dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/usbdrive/sda-crippled.mbr bs=512 count=1


# Now we're going to try to restore the actual partition table. I would
# restore the whole MBR but here's this way to restore ONLY the p.table

DISCLAIMER: You use this at entirely your own risk!

cd /to/original/backup/directory/
dd if=sda-mbr of=/dev/sda bs=1 count=64 skip=446 seek=446

If you want to restore the whole MBR:
dd if=sda-mbr of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

HTH,
Jorge