# Oh, man ... I'm so screwed!!! Can I recover an overwritten partition table?



## tanyatnt (Jan 16, 2004)

Once again, I'm here begging for help from people more knowledgeable than I!  

I had a upgraded 160GB Tivo drive that died which had a pretty bad partition table. I was planning to copy the MFS partitions on the drive over to a new 250GB drive that I have but I needed a good Tivo image to load onto the 250GB disk to get it to boot up.

Well, I found an image which will boot but it only has Tivo software version 4.0 something, which would mean that I couldn't access my full 250GB disk plus I also wanted to get the 150 hours of recordings off of the 160GB drive. 

Anyway, I'd spent the last 2 days trying to get everything to work when today, in a fit of exhaustion, I accidentally did a mfsrestore of the Tivo image onto my 160GB drive. The good news is that the partition table is now not "unknown" but the bad news is that all of the partitions are (of course) the wrong ones for the data on the disk.

So, finally, my question is, can I still get these recordings off of the 160GB disk? I do have the entire (bad) partition table for the disk written down so I could reconstruct it using pdisk. Would this let me get to my recordings so that I could copy them over to the good disk with dd?

Thanks!!


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

Even if you could do this, you won't recover your recordings. The Now Playing list is in the image data you restored. Therefore, you overwrote the NP list on your 160GB drive with the one in the image. Even if you had not made this mistake, you'd have the same problem - any "foreign" image will not contain the Now Playing list from your old image.

You might have been able to extract the recordings at the file level before you blew away the partition table. You still might be able to get some of them if you are able to reconstruct the partition table. But you'll have to look elsewhere for info on file level extraction (think about looking for a "deal" on "database" at a ".com" site).


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