Use this when your MBR gets corrupted – usually happens after you reinstall windows. Pop in a bootable ubuntu DVD and boot into it. Then open a terminal and type in the following commands…

$ sudo grub
> find /boot/grub/stage1
(hd0,1)
> root (hd0,1) #Must be same as the output of the last command
> setup (hd0)

Make a backup of a local hard disk on remote host via ssh

dd bs=1M if=/dev/hda | gzip | ssh user@ip_addr 'dd of=hda.gz'

Backup content of the harddrive to a file. Creates an image of the drive

dd if=/dev/sda of=/tmp/sda.iso

Shows all partitions on the HDD

fdisk -l

Repair / check integrity of linux filesystem on disk hda1

fsck  /dev/hda1

Check bad blocks in disk hda1

badblocks  -v  /dev/hda1

Linux Command to search the Harddisk for bad sectors

sudo badblocks -v /dev/sda

<p class=”intro”>If you have many IDE harddisks connected to the system(but not mounted), this command will find it. This will work for sata HDD as well if you use ‘sd’ instead of ‘hd’</p>

<pre><code class=”cli”>
ls /dev/hd*
</code></pre>

<p>Simple, is it not? To find the mounted drives just use the command ‘dh’.</p>

[tags]hda,harddisk,ide,sata,linux,command,hdd,partition[/tags]