Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (5100 mails)

[Doug McGarrett <dmcgarrett@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thursday 03 June 2004 16:06, Stephen W wrote:
> People, I'm learning ... Thanks for our help.  Now I
> have been able to access 3 of the drives seen by my
> bios (Master Primary, Master Slave and Secondary
> Slave... the Secondary Master is still missing to
> linux).
>
/snip/

IF the old Windows disk was NOT formatted in NTFS,
and you have a dos boot  floppy with fdisk on it, then boot
off the floppy and then issue the command fdisk -mbr
This should reinitialise the master boot record if the disk
is really functional.  It will destroy any multi-boot stuff
of course.  But you'll be able to read the drive.  

There are one or two dos programs that will read anything
readable on a drive, as long as it is turning and the heads
will move, but I don't know offhand what they are.  I have
actually seen one of them work!

>
> I can access files on the old linux disk (SuSE) and
> one of my old Windows disks.  I am still not able to
> access the old primary Windows disk (which in the old
> system was C) and the one I am not able to dual boot
> from... this is what started all of this... when I
> tried to boot the old system one day I got this error
> message:
>
> GRUB hard disk failure...
>

/snip/