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I recently made a mistake and instead of just erasing the bootloader from the MBR of a notebook, I erased the full MBR. Of course I made a backup before writing to MBR - but I made it to the second partiton of the disk...
So I tried the parted and the gpart heuristics, but actually none of them gave usable results. Then I just dd'ed with netcat the whole hdd to my machine, used GetDataBack with wine, that found the relevant file, copied the mbr to a pendrive, plugged in to the notebook and dd'ed it back to the hdd.
After a reboot, everything was back. Sadly I didn't really had time in the last one and a half day to do this, except last night. So I had frustrating 36 hours, as I wasn't entirely sure if this was possible to do or not.
Life is good. :)