Hi Petr, Rebuilding a partition table is relatively trivial - err...compared to some other data recovery tasks anyway. You should first check to see if the MBR is actually ruined (see what fdisk "sees" as the partitions on the disk). Chances are something else is wrong, not your MBR.
Oh, before you try messing around on the disk - you might want to google around for backed up MBRs. I know that windows detects changes to your MBR, not sure if any OSes keep a real backup. You might also consider waiting to see if anyone else has a better suggestion than re-writing it. Anyway, if it's borked, you should re-write value boot code (using fdisk or fbsd's sysinstall or something) and then start locating the boot sector for each partition with a disk editor. The first one will probably be at sector 64. Valid bootsectors end with the bytes 55AAh. The next step is to find out how big that partition is. I've never seen a boot sector that didn't contain the # of sectors for that partition somewhere in its data. If you google for boot sector information for the particular file system it belongs to, there should be info about the offset to this value. Write it down. Once you have the sector # to the bootsector and the number of sectors for the partition you can go back to the MBR and type it back in to the appropriate locations. If you need a disk editor, look for wde_v30b.zip - I coded in a bootsector search function. It'll take awhile but it should find your windows boot sector. I think norton's diskedit makes editing these fields easy, but I can't recall if it supported editing the mbr and entire disk or just fat partitions. Best Regards, Ben Cadieux