The Linux hard drive is partitioned in various partitions/volumes for effective management of your valuable data. Linux hard drive volumes start from the boot block where boot information of the operating system is stored. Last two byes of the Linux boot block contains boot block signature. In some cases, operating system cannot locate boot block signature and the disk cannot be accessed. It makes your significant data inaccessible and leads to data loss. Such cases require you to either restore data from backup or use Linux data recovery software to scan the drive and extract data from it.
For example, you might encounter an error message similar to the following one when you attempt to boot a Linux operating system based computer-
"Master boot record on /dev/hda has been updated."
Subsequent to the above error, you may also encounter further error message that states-
"No boot signature found on partition"
The system cannot be booted in such cases and you face severe data loss situations. To recover your business-critical data in such cases, you are required to opt for Linux recovery tools.
Grounds of the issue
This problem most frequently occurs if you overwrite the LILO (Linux Loader) boot loader with the MBR (Master Boot Record) that was primarily installed on the /dev/hda disk volume. The boot loader might be overwritten if you try to install it using -M switch. Boot block corruption also results into the same problem.
How to fix boot block corruption problem?
In order to work around this problem, you have to overwrite the Master Boot Record with Linux Loader. It is possible with the help of /sbin/lilo Linux command. This command enables the operating system to overwrite MBR information on the /dev/hdX disk. Alternatively you can use LILO on the /dev/hda2 disk as:
boot=/dev/hda2
lilo -b /dev/hda2
lilo -M /dev/hda
lilo -A /dev/hda 2
In case the above method does not work, you will have to reinstall operating system. As reinstalling the operating system removes all the data from Linux partition, you will need data recovery Linux methods to get your precious data back. Linux data recovery software employs highly-advanced Ext2 recovery algorithms to ensure absolute recovery. The advanced Ext3 recovery software are absolutely safe to use with read-only Linux recovery conduct.