[ale] Recovered mariposa's hard drive

[mark at vielle.datasys.net (Mark R. Lindsey)]

Y'all might remember that last week I asked about techniques for finding
the partitions on a drive with a broken partition table.  I worked on
the machine quite a bit since then, and with God's help I finally found
all of the partitions. I've booted the machine, to test it. Everything
looks fine.

I'll probably write a mini-howto for the Linux community's benefit, but
here's a word to the wise: backup your partition table! The partition
table is composed of the first 446 bytes of a devices; you can make a
simple backup of the partition table on /dev/hda with

	dd if=/dev/hda of=partition_table_backup bs=446 count=1

and restore that backup with

	dd if=partition_table_backup of=/dev/hda

In addition to making a backup of your partition table, also be careful
to note all settings in your boot or SCSI bios' that may affect how the
disk is accessed; these would include anything such as geometry settings
(LBA, non-LBA, `normal', or `large' mode on some systems), blocking
modes, &c.

lilo makes a backup copy of the partition table (it just takes a
512-byte bite) to /boot/boot.xxyy, where xx is the 0-padded device major
number, and yy is the 0-padded device minor number. Beware, however,
that it won't overwrite an old /boot/boot.* file.