Ah, this reminds me of the time a few years ago when I accidentally deleted `sudo`. A lot of stuff broke and it was interesting running around in a system where things would sort of work, but sort of not really.

I learned then that sudo was really just a binary, so I tried to get a copy and put it in the right place. I couldn't, though, because I didn't have write permissions to it without sudo!

In hindsight I guess I could've just run the binary itself to get access, or put it elsewhere on my $PATH, or use `su` instead. Not sure if I tried those things, it was a while ago and I was pretty new to Linux. Maybe I got the file from the internet and didn't know to make it executable.

Anyway, what I ended up doing was booting up from a live Ubuntu USB and copying the sudo from the live environment to my installation on disk. It worked, and my newbie self felt like a proper hacker, fixing the unfixable. For one day I was a heart transplant surgeon :)

Oh, what fun! Our system administrator decided once to duplicate the boot partition of a server, so we had a spare should the usual one fail. He used dd of course. And the next day, he was off to a USENIX conference. What he had forgotten, though, was that the first partition on the disk actually contained the partition table! (This was on Solaris, or possibly SunOS.) Since the source disk and the target disk had different partition tables, things started falling apart. It did not happen all at once, probably due to caching. But we started getting more and more weird errors. It took me half the day to figure out what had happened. By great luck, I had actually saved a copy of all partition tables just a few days prior. They were in human readable form, but good enough for me to restore the damaged partition table to its original state. A reboot later, all problems were gone.

How did you get it out of RAM so cleanly?

Reminds of this story: https://www.ecb.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/recovery.html

(And its HN thread, with other recovery stories: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25491790)

That’s great, I had the same problem but didn’t hack it like you did unfortunately. I overwrote the first 30 GB of my 6 TB HDD and am trying out GetDataBack Pro to get my files back, no luck so far. I had some tens of thousands of photos that I can’t replace.

Oh yeah overwriting the partition table can be "fun". Once wrote the partition table of a floppy to my hard drive. That was when I was still running DOS. Used a disk hex editor (I think it was part of pctools) to change it back to the correct values.