Re: c00l hack

Article: 7590 of alt.hackers
From: wsantee@cyberspace.com (Wes Santee)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: c00l hack
Date: 3 Apr 1995 19:53:43 -0700
Organization: C y b e r S p a c e  (206) 505-5577
Lines: 50
Approved: me
Message-ID: 3lqcbn$h6h@case.cyberspace.com
NNTP-Posting-Host: case.cyberspace.com
Status: RO

Clayton O'Neill sez:
>Wes Santee (wsantee@cyberspace.com) wrote:
>:[rebuilding Novell partition]
>
>Boy, you must have worked in a weenie business group.  When *I* worked at

I guess it depends on your point of view.  I was (one of) the data
recovery guys for Norton Utils.  Normally focused on rebuilding
Stacker/DriveSpace/DoubleSpace/etc... drives, cleaning up after virus
hits, rebuilding disks at the physical disk level by back-calculation
partition sizes based on the number of sectors per fat when the
partition table and LBR were hosed, or was normally the case, a
combination of the above.

Since I hardly ever dealt with Novell, the hack was rebuilding
something I had no idea what the structure was with 100% recovery.
Judge it as you will.

>product).  That usually entailed rebuilding the MBR, boot sector (Which
>is on Cyl 0, Side 1, Sect 1, BTW), and the first sector of the root

You're right.  I always had to double check that because the partition
table view in DiskEdit shows Side, Cyl, Sec which would be (1,0,1).
The more comman Cyl Side Sec notation (brought up ala Alt-P) would
show it as (0,1,1).  Actually, you could put the boot record on the
first partition anywhere you please as long as you update the
partition table and the "Special Hidden Sectors" entry in the boot
record.

On another note, thanks to everybody who responded that I bought the
April 1st post hook, line, and sinker.  I promised myself that I
wasn't going to watch out for that, but the post got the better of me!
Well done!  (At least you all know how I feel about the subject).

ObHack:
Hmmmm, while we're on the data recovery motif, I remember when I had
to talk a guy through a complete drive rebuild over the phone.  The
hack was that the guy knew about 20 words in English so after
explaining what some of the keys on the keyboard were, I did it
entirely blind by telling him to do nothing but things like "Press
TAB 3 times, type 145, press Enter."  He couldn't explain to me what
was on his screen so I had to just try to mentally perceive what he
was seeing and act accordingly.

Cheers,
--
( -Wes Santee              | I feel my body weakened by the years      )
( wsantee@cyberspace.com   | As people turn to gods of cruel design    )
( O S / 2  W A R P         | Could it be they fear the pain of death?  )
(                          | Or could it be they fear the joy of life? )

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