Sorry for late reply, been very busy. Read on. jayhen wrote:
1) The FAT on my windows HD in my Linux computer crashes and yes I umount the HD immediately. I'm still able to reboot to windows and after scandisk completes its process I'm able to use the HD as if nothing had happened. I have tried this process at least 30 or 40 times and haven't lost any data so far.
2) I can access a windows HD on another computer without any problems.
My question is :
1) Why can I access a windows HD on another computer without any problems?
That computer is set up and working correctly ;-)
2) Why does it not work anymore on my local (Linux/Windows dual boot) computer? kcommander2 doesn't even start up anymore, before it gets the chance to start it (kcommander2) crashes.
I have no idea. Did you do anything to your windows partition beforehand (like change format to FAT32 or such like)? Did you upgrade your kernel or anything else that might be involved directly with the filesystem?
3) What do I need to check or change to get the process to work again?
If you haven't changed anything mentioned above, the only thing I can suggest is to make a backup of your Windows partition, reformat, and reinstall... If you do this, make a boot disk so that you can make your Windows partition bootable again. Sorry I don't have any more useful suggestions.
4) Are you the only Linux Guru on the net (SuSE mail list)? Why do I ask, it seems like if you do not answer the tough questions, they do not get answered.
First of all, I am definitely not a guru. There are many more people on this list who are closer to 'guru' status than I am, but like me, they probably have very little spare time ;-)
Chris Reeves wrote:
jayhen wrote:
I use to be able to access my windows HD with Kcommander2 but for some strange reason it doesn't work anymore. If it by chance does work, the information is garbled and the windows fat gets messed up.
If I access a windows partition on another computer it works perfectly but not on my own compter. What can I do to get everything to work again. After umounting and mounting /dev/hda5 I can read the HD but garbled.
Looks like your Windows partition has died... can you still boot Windows? I would umount the partition immediately and try Windows boot. When you say it works perfectly on another computer, I assume you mean you can access the Windows partition on the other computer perfectly, not that you can access the Win partition on the 'broken' computer *from* the other computer perfectly...
If the FAT partition is, indeed, dead, then you may be able to recover the data - there should be a backup (secondary) FAT on the drive which you can copy over the corrupted one.
Here are the Error Messages from the Xconsole.
Dec 26 11:11:39 linux kernel: fat_clusters_flush: Did not find valid FSINFO signature. Found 0x0. offset=0x3e0 Dec 26 11:11:49 linux kernel: fat_read_super: Did not find valid FSINFO signature. Found 0x400893c8 Dec 26 11:11:49 linux kernel: Directory 1: bad FAT Dec 26 11:11:49 linux kernel: Filesystem panic (dev 03:05). Dec 26 11:11:49 linux kernel: FAT error Dec 26 11:11:49 linux kernel: File system has been set read-only Dec 26 11:11:49 linux kernel: Filesystem panic (dev 03:05). Dec 26 11:11:49 linux kernel: FAT error Dec 26 11:11:49 linux kernel: Directory 437: bad FAT Dec 26 11:11:49 linux kernel: Filesystem panic (dev 03:05). Dec 26 11:11:49 linux kernel: FAT error
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