A friend of mine brought a NTFS (Windows XP) hard drive that had been “erased” by a virus of some kind. I said I’d try to recover the lost data, which was unreadable to Windows.

After wasting some time undeleting a bunch of garbage on some other unimportant partitions, I realized that the main NTFS partition had not been automatically mounted for me - meaning there might be a problem with the partition itself. After manually attempting to mount the partition, I got a message that the boot sector was corrupt. So what to do?

NTFS partitions have a backup of the boot sector located on the last sector of the NTFS partition. There are probably various programs out there that one can pay for to restore this backup copy to its rightful place. There might even be a “Microsoft way” of doing things, which I can only guess requires you to agree to the terms of some EULA and give away any rights you have to your great collection of polka MP3s. Instead, all you need to do is this one line (as root):

mount -t ntfs /dev/sdg1 /media/tmp -o errors=recover

where you need to replace “/dev/sdg1″ with your NTFS partition location (I connected this drive with an external USB carrier) and “/media/tmp” with the location you’d like to mount the fixed partition. That’s all! Once you’ve mounted it, it’s fixed automatically and might even be bootable again (if this is the only problem you have).

This will even work if you accidentally begin to copy data over the beginning of your NTFS partition, since the copy of the boot sector is at the end of the partition. Note: This only works with kernel versions 2.6 and newer.  Can’t get a much easier fix than that!

Glad to find out I’m really not the only person that wondered this: what about the other guilty men? Granted, G.W. and co. didn’t gas anybody; they didn’t invade Kuwait - just Iraq. However, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died as a result, and thousands of US soldiers have been killed. After torturing, murdering, and brutally killing innocents, why are we supposed to forget the depth of badness done by the Bush regime after a dictator created by us is killed?

Who encouraged him to invade Iran in 1980 (his greatest war crime)? The US did. Who sold him the chemical weapons components he used against Iran and the Kurds? The US did. Our support of the dictator now disposed of by the US wasn’t talked about during his trial; it wouldn’t have been, as that would directly involve the USA with his war crimes.

Let’s imagine, for a moment, a world where people are responsible for their actions. Next let’s imagine a powerful world leader, directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in an illegal war based on lies and ulterior motives (sounds similar to that Saddam fellow, eh?). It seems obvious that a person displaying such an abuse of power resulting in the deaths of so many people should somehow be forced to accept responsibility for such an action. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

In the real world, this rarely happens. Saddam ultimately (unwillingly, he had no choice) accepted punishment for his actions - in part for the deaths that were directly attributed to his actions as a leader. So what about all the other bad guys, the ones that are responsible for the brutal deaths of so many innocent people in Iraq as a result of an egregious abuse of power? When will they be held responsible? Is Iraq the only place in the world where the government believes in this strange “leaders taking responsibility for their actions” concept?

If leaders were held responsible for their actions, then G.W. and co. would have thought twice about lying to America and attacking a country illegally. Because, as we just recently experienced, when you’re the big man in charge - you never imagine its going to be your neck in the noose.