Linux Community Magazine

Master Boot Record or MBR is the store of all the information, required by the operating for the execution of the booting process. This information is located at the first sector of the hard drive. The end of the MBR sector reveals the knowledge about the bootable partition. In Linux, the MBR is directly accessible through the dd command.But unfortunately, a mere misdeed with this information can fetch some drastic mishaps to the data. The data may become inaccessible (as the booting of the system would not be succeeded) and the Linux data recovery need may step into the scenario.This usually happens when this MBR gets overwritten. The chances of this phenomenon rises particularly when you are dual booting between Windows and Linux. However, there are few cases when the overwriting or the corruption of MBR is observed like:* Wrong use of dd: dd command can be used to restore MBR as:# dd if=/path/mbr-backup of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1But the incorrect use may overwrite the e xisting MBR and may corrupt it.* In the dual boot system and while working with Windows, clicking on hibernate instead of shutdown may overwrite the existing MBR. The GRUB boot loader, which is the multiboot loader, then gets housed.This is the clear threat to your data and it may remain inaccessible until you apply the fixing mechanism for the damaged MBR or some Linux recovery utility. Linux Distribution CD may help you in this regard, from which the booting of the system is required and some BIOS settings are required while the mere GRUB corruption can be cured with the following command:# grub-install /dev/hdaNote: in case of SCSI hard disk, the device node is /dev/sda instead of /dev/hda of IDE hard disk.If the problem is un-addressable by any of the fix, data recovery Linux is the way to go through third party application. This software has the inbuilt power to scan the hard drive thoroughly and o retrieve the information. Termed as Linux recovery software, these addre ss each specific problem of data loss and offer an interactive interface to the users.Stellar Phoenix Linux Data Recovery software works for all the data loss instances in the most effective and easy manner. Without letting you know any technical details about the data recovery Linux process, this software goes well with Ext2, Ext3 and Reiser FS file systems.This Linux data recovery utility is applicable for all the Linux flavors. The File Filter and File Mask like options add to the advantages of this Linux recovery tool and software is viable for recovering each type of file.