Clayton Cornell wrote:
My never ending nightmare of problems getting a friend's computer working with a dual boot (SuSE8.2/Win2k) is still.... never ending. Sigh.
New problem... maybe someone can point me in a sensible direction. I had the system up and running nicely until last weekend. The owner of the system decided to install Easy CD Creator into WIn2k. Bad idea it turns out as this completely stuffed the Win2k install (turns out this is a common problem with Win2k and Roxio software).
A reboot to Linux was fine so it wasn't too catastophic. I just said reinstall Win2k and then use CD1 of SuSE8.2 to get back into the Linux install and re-write GRUB to the MBR. Sounds easy enough right?
Win2k was booted from CD and installed, It said it needed to do the first of many reboots to continue the install. Then on reboot it claimed that the boot.ini file was missing or corrupt. I figured we could just boot back to Linux for now and ignore the Win2k problems - I was planning on doing a reinstall later this weekend when I had more time. Well now Linux will not boot... can't find the root partition anymore. I fire up the Linux rescue system, and can't mount hda4 where the Linux root partition should be. If I run Linux fdisk and display the partition table it's all scrambled.
I expected the partiton table to show something along the lines of: hda1 45GB NTFS hda2 100GB FAT32 hda3 1GB Linux swap hda4 45GB Linux Reiser
Instead it shows: hda1 ID72 (Unknown) hda2 ID74 (Unknown) hda3 ID65 (Novell Netware 386) hda4 ID 0 (Empty) with what looks like random drive sizes and random start end sectors for each partition. ID numbers 72 and 74 don't even show up in the partition types...
The Win2k re-install should not have screwed up the partitions... should it have? There was no messing about in the partitions with the re-install. It was a simple reformat of hda1 (C: drive) and install.
I can't find a way to remount hda4 from the Linux rescue system. Nor can I remount any partition from the Win2k recue console.
I woudl really like to recover data from hda2 (photos) and from hda4 (email) before another attempt at a complete reinstall of WIn2k and Linux. Any idea of how I can go about doing this?
What you are experiencing is similar to what I suffered recently. Everything is still there (except Win system) but can't be seen because the mbr is stuffed. What I had to do was to boot with a DOS disk (created using Me because it recognises FAT32) and then recreated the MBR (with 'fdisk /mbr'), then used fdisk to "view" the HD so that it knew which partitions were there. After re-booting I rechecked using fdisk that everything was OK. I then installed <shudder> Win.Linux will boot as per your attempts above using the install disk. Try the above -- and don't panic. I know it's difficult especially when you are doing this for someone else and you wished to god you didn't get involved in the whole business! :-(. -- Understanding only begins with the act of perception.