On Friday 20 May 2005 16:11, Carl E. Hartung wrote:
On Friday 20 May 2005 02:09 am, AD Marshall wrote: <snippage>
But the real issue is how to get it, Windows 2000, back?
<more snippage>
* Now, i can boot into Windows but can only get a "C:\>" prompt, with a very limited command set available. "C:\boot.ini" is still there and *looks* OK, but i'm not sure what to do and am afraid to try more without knowing more.
<more snippage>
Hi Andi,
<cach luon>
If my understanding concerning NT/2K/XP installation commonalities is correct, you need three system files to load the OS once the partition/disk is bootable and active:
boot.ini (pointing to a valid M$ installation) ntldr ntdetect.com
HTH, good luck & regards,
Nah. It's the bootable bit that's the problem. As mentioned, but <snipped>, I can still mount -o rw /windows/C. Just can't boot from it *normally*. Can get a DOS prompt, but not Win2K/NT. Note: am@[~]$ ls -l /windows/C/{boot*,nt[dl]*} -rwxrwxr-x 1 root users 218 2005-04-21 13:23 /windows/C/boot.ini -rwxrwxr-x 1 root users 0 2005-05-20 12:41 /windows/C/bootlog.prv -rwxrwxr-x 1 root users 0 2005-05-20 12:46 /windows/C/bootlog.txt -rwxrwxr-x 1 root users 512 2005-01-10 11:10 /windows/C/bootsect.dos -r-xr-xr-x 1 root users 34724 2005-02-07 17:46 /windows/C/ntdetect.com -r-xr-xr-x 1 root users 214432 2005-02-07 17:46 /windows/C/ntldr Problem is I may have run /sbin/dosfsck (/usr/share/man/man8/dosfsck.8.gz) unwisely and replaced a corrupted MBR with an inappropriate one. But looking at that /windows/C/bootsect.dos above, just gave me an idea: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 512 2005-04-25 22:30 /boot/backup_mbr is the same size. What if i temporarily replace the bootsect.dos with the backup_mbr? Lessee... [Fri May 20 20:48:42 ICT 2005] ... [Fri May 20 21:04:22 ICT 2005] Nope. Same ol' C:\> prompt. Suspiciously, this file is close to the same date/time as the backup_mbr, above (next from /windows/C/): -rwxrwxr-x 1 root users 16 2005-04-25 06:11 hal-dbus-xgl The contents, "HAL, DBUS, XGL", show i made it during one of my last Windows sessions, a note to look up those concepts (that i could access from Win or Lin). But that's just yet another red herring. Next!...