- This topic has 43 replies, 14 voices, and was last updated 15 years, 4 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
Bit of a slow night tonight so having a bit of delving around Sammys ‘innards’
Using Easeus’ Data Recovery Pro I’ve managed to extract the contents of the 6Gb EISA partion.
Hmm is this a step in working out how to recreate the Recovery Partition I ask myself?
Ok so what have I found out so far ?
Samsung Recovery Solution is actually a rebranded version of Winclon
As well as the Winclon software the recovery partion contains a windows recovery folder with a windows directory & the boot .ini,ntldr , IO.sysy files etc
There’s also a boot directory containg a copy of bcd, bootfix.bin & etfsboot.com
In theory recreating the original Recovery partion would be as follows however I’m not brave enough to deliberately flatten my Sammy & try it ;o)
a) need to obtain an extracted copy of the original Samsung files (these come to approx 850mb if you exclude the init.wcl * init.woo files which are the initial backup).
b) You need to create the EISA partition, the microsoft instructions can be found here
c) You (may ) need to install Grub4doas to allow you to boot fom the hidden eisa partition.
As regards Grub4dos I haven’t been able to find it’s files anywhere on the HDD including in the files extracted from the recovery partition so I suspect it may somehow be embedded in the BIOS (I did provide a link elsewhere about phoenix being involved in a deal with Samsung about a related matter)
What would be interesting (& may help prove this) is if someone who has swapped out their HDD (or whoi has deleted their recovery partition and original XP install) could tell me if they can get to a Grub4dos prompt by hitting ‘C’ at boot time (just as you see the Samsung splash screen)
I’ll admit to being a rank amateur & fiddler so fi this helps as a spring board for someone with a bit more knowledge/experience…..
Good job, PanMan!
I have been trying to figure out how to put the recovery partition back and use F4 myself too.
I have nuked my HDD. I have removed the recovery partition, and created two primary partitions, one for the XP system (as drive C:) and the other for my data (as drive D:) and reinstalled XP home from the Samsung CD to the first primary partition.
I have tried pressing C while booting many times over, but it doesn’t get to Grub4Dos prompt. BTW, I have overwritten my MBR as well so that might be the reason why I can’t get to Grub4Dos prompt by pressing C any more.
I am not really sure if Samsung has installed Grub4Dos on it. I don’t remember seeing gldr, or menu.lst. Actually, we could get a better idea by having a look at the original MBR that was there when out of the box. Since I have overwritten my MBR, I cannot myself, but can anyone with the original MBR make it available somewhere for download, especially the first 446 bytes? I think the original MBR will reveal a bit of information about what goes on when booting the NC10 as well as about the way recovery partition is used.
I am really dying to know what exactly happens when hitting F4. If it can be figured out, we could even manage to make it boot something of our choice from the hidden partition. That will be very useful indeed. We could even put grub to the first sector of the hidden partition and create a menu of systems to boot and so on.
BTW, I thought Samsung Recovery Solution was a customized version of Phoenix Recovery Pro. I haven’t heard of WinClon before so I will need to find more information about it. Thanks for your work PanMan again. I hope we can nail this thing down.
Cheers,
EugeneOk SIlly qustion . How do I get a copy of the MBR?
It deffo has G4D as default but as you say I cant for the life of me find the config files
Update:
Ok had a coffee and woken up now ;o)Just used HDhacker to get the MBR from my Dual booted XP/Vista Sammy. File is here if anyones interested
Know we need someone with a vanilla install 🙂
[quote1231871956=PanMan]
Know we need someone with a vanilla install 🙂
[/quote1231871956]
Silly Q but what is a vanilla install?Thanks for starting this thread. I’ve been using PTEDIT32.exe to look at the partition tables and the MBR. Not sure if it will do you any good the way it displays it but I’ll post it for you to look at. I’ve changed the partition type from 12 to 07 so you can see it in Windows as a drive. It’s formatted NTFS. I copied all the files off of the recovery partition but haven’t done much more with it to this point.
I’m trying to do the same thing in that I want to use F4 to boot the recovery partition to do a restore of the image I put there. I find Samsung’s process for this to restrictive but if I can use their stuff to “boot” the partition and run WinClon, or something else, to do a backup/restore that would be the best for me. To be able to hit F4 on boot and recover with no CD, flashdrive, or multiboot loader would be great.
UPDATE: I grabbed the MBR and the boot sector off of a friends. The only thing he did was not create a D drive partition which I don’t think will affect anything we’re looking at. So these are the closest to out of the box that I can get. The links don’t work but if you cut and paste them into a browser manually they do. UGH
I got the MBR and Boot Sector after unhiding the recovery partition.
http://www.hard-core-ware.com/images/MBR_HardDisk0.dat
http://www.hard-core-ware.com/images/BootSector_DriveRECOVERY.datCurt
Quote:Ok if someone wants to tell me how to upload my image and use the to display it that would be great. MAN! You would think I had never used a forum before. I’m use to a button to upload the image I just don’t see one. UGHYou need to upload your image to somewhere like ImageShack then put the web address for the image they give you in the {IMG} tags.
[quote1231878905=crazyst]
UPDATE: I grabbed the MBR and the boot sector off of a friends. The only thing he did was not create a D drive partition which I don’t think will affect anything we’re looking at. So these are the closest to out of the box that I can get.[/quote1231878905]I’ll have to take a closer look.
The MBR you posted and the MBR PanMan posted are the same, well except for the partition table.EDIT: hmm if Samsung are using GRUB4DOS which has a GNU General Public Licence, can’t we request a copy of the source code from them?
Good point Alfihar.
Still cant find where the hell its hidden though .
In the meantime this is a directory/file listing of the Recovery Partition
http://sharetheexperience.co.uk/Documents/srs.txt
Edit:
FWIW here’s an email I just popped over to Samsung UKQuote:Hi Guys,
firstly it would be helpful if you included the NC10 in the drop down options of models available ;o)Anyways to the question in hand, if you refer to http://www.sammymobile.com/plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?10242 you will see a number of us enthusiasts are tryiing to work out how to restore the recovery partion afer making changes to our Sammys.
One thing (amongst many ) thats bugging me is where the hell have you installed grub4dos ?
Canty find it on the original XP partition nor in the files I’ve extracted from the recovery partion.
What would be great is if one of you guys would be willing/could join in the discussion online.
Many Thanks
Mike
Just a quick note to thank PanMan and crazys for making MBRs available. I need to get back to my meeting so I will have a look the MBRs when I get some free time later. I hope I do find something useful but then I lost most of my assembly knowledge long time ago! 🙂
If anyone with a good knowledge of Intel machine code can have a look at those 446 bytes of the uploaded MBRs, that would be great!
Cheers to all,
EugeneWhilst we wait for Eugene I’ve found a little utility called MBRwizard[/link (caution you could kill your Sammy!) which allows you to read & modify your MBR from within windows.
Interestingly it doesn’t think that the diags partition is hidden ;o)
Disk: 0 Size: 153G CHS: 19457 255 63
Pos MBRndx Type/Name Size Active Hide Start Sector Sectors DL Vol Label
—
—-
—-
—
0 0 12-DIAG 6.1G No No 63 12,594,897 —
1 1 07-NTFS 26G Yes No 12,594,960 52,500,420 E:
2 3 0F-EXTEND 26G No No 65,095,380 52,516,485 D:
3 2 07-NTFS 95G No No 117,611,865 194,966,183 —Disk: 1 Size: 1.9G CHS: 244 255 63
Pos MBRndx Type/Name Size Active Hide Start Sector Sectors DL Vol Label
—
—-
—-
—
0 0 06-FAT16B 1.9G No No 255 3,931,905 F:Status read successfully as 0
Disk 0 signature read as 0BCD6B96
Another quick note for PanMan and others in the thread;
I have had a very quick look at the uploaded MBR and I don’t recognize it as that of Grub4Dos, I am afraid. I haven’t had time to have a detailed look at it but just a quick scan via XVI32 (a good free hex viewer/editor) shows no sign of Grub4Dos. If Samsung has installed Grub4Dos, it does not seem to have been installed in the MBR. I even tried editing the first 446 bytes of own MBR to be equal to the one that was uploaded by crazyst. Still, I could not get to Grub4Dos prompt by pressing C at boot time as suggested by PanMan. I wonder if I am the only one who is not able to. Can other NC10 owners (who have not installed Grub4Dos themselves) get to Grub4Dos prompt on their factory default NC10?
BTW, I don’t think it’s a standard MS-DOS generated MBR like we used to get by issuing fdisk /mbr either.
Good tools like MBRWizard and many others are available on Hiren’s BootCD. Google for it for further information. Another good collection of tools can be obtained from “Ultimate Boot CD”.
My hypothesis is that if I take a copy of MBR from a computer which has Grub4Dos installed on its MBR and take a copy of MBR from an NC10, the first 44x something bytes should match if Samsung has installed a standard Grub4Dos on the MBR of the NC10. But then they don’t seem to match.
Well, that’s what I have found so far. I am afraid I am pretty loaded with work at the moment and going to be quite busy for next a few days. I will try to get back to the thread as I sneak off my work time to time 🙂
Cheers!
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.