[COLUG] Dead hard drives

[Brian Miller]

At the meeting today, we looked at a dead hard drive, and Linux "fdisk -l" 
found no valid partition table on the disk.  I suggested that perhaps running 
the DOS "fdisk /mbr e:", where e: represents the DOS drive letter of the 
drive, might help recover it.

I've had two thoughts since then.  "fdisk /mbr" might not accept a drive 
letter argument.  You may need to boot from a floppy, with the bad disk set 
up as hda (c:) for it to work.  Also, the Linux "fdisk /dev/hdd" (without the 
-l) will report no valid DOS partition table, and will offer to create it for 
you.  If does warn you that all previous content will be lost.  This might be 
another way to try to recover the disk.