The DD command ate my lunch

[hoboscience]

Greetings! Stumbled upon this site hoping for an answer I have asked below. I Look forward to being a member of this community. But first a question...


A couple weeks ago I made a big mistake. I was working within my Ubuntu system using the "DD" command to write a Fedora ISO image to a USB drive. Instead of the USB drive I accidentally overwrote my windows drive destroying my windows boot header. So I used the "DD Recover" command to create an .img file of the hard drive I just overwrote. Now I can access the Windows files using lost partition finding software but what I ultimately what to do is get this harddrive back to its normal state. So my question is how can I take this lost Windows partition and remount it somehow so it could boot up normally?


Thanks

 

[creativity]

Maybe booting to a Windows disk to get to the auto repair to restore the corrupted boot files. Though that may ruin your grub install as I am assuming you are dual-booting.

Beyond that, saving your files and re-installing Windows. Would be easier.

If anyone else knows more...

 

[hoboscience]

Hey creativity,
I'm not using Grub, my linux and windows are on separate hard disks so I just pick what disk to boot from at startup. I have already re-installed windows and backed up my files that are on the lost partition. I was hoping it would be that simple but it appears that some files I am working with are being stubborn. I am get invalid header errors when loading them. I am thinking they are being driven by some Windows system files that were loaded previously before the big mishap. Thats my theory at least.

 

[creativity]

I am thinking they are being driven by some Windows system files that were loaded previously before the big mishap.

Yea that's probably a good guess. Some sort of dependencies are missing. What type of files are they? You might be able to try and track down the dependencies and install them...

 

[hoboscience]

I'm certain that won't work. These few files that have the invalid header issues are tags used for the halo game engine. The default halo tags work great, but these specific ones causing problems are created by opensource hobbyist that built their own tag sources. I've reached out to them but I didn't find much help there.

I still have the old Window System files and I wish I could just copy the windows folder onto the new install but I'm thinking that wouldn't workout well....haha

 

[Veraster]

You said you were able to recover the windows files but not the boot info. Can you just copy the Windows files back on your hard drive and use Boot-Repair?
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

 

[hoboscience]

That just might be crazy enough to work. Its the best suggestion so far. I'll give it a try. I'm copying the files over right now. This will definitely take some time. I'll keep you posted.