sud_crow Posted January 16, 2004 Report Share Posted January 16, 2004 (edited) Im (read, hiting my head against a wall) Here is the background info: Im at my parent´s house for the hollidays, and my father has a celeron 333 with win98 and a couple of HDs, so i took off the cd-rom and connected my HD (there is also a cd-rw) Then i downloaded Damn Small Linux (as i have dial up here too) and used it for a couple of days from the CD, but i wanted to have a working Linux from the HD, and as mine had some free space i made the parititon and proceded to install it following the instructions. After running the first script (the one that does the install) i runned the second, the one that installs LILO, the script crashed at some stage, cant tell which one. Then i shutted down the PC and went to eat dinner, when my father turned it on, booted on windows, he couldnt find the D disc (or hdc in Linux), then i went crazy thinking what could i´ve done... It seems that disk has a problem in its partition table or boot table or whatever, and cant boot (this is a fact and has nothing to do with what i did), then when i runned the LILO install something was written (dont know what or how) and now the disk is not being recognized as a working or formated one. When i run cfdisk or fdisk i get the error about the partition table not being there or something like that and if i want to start from zero. I dont know what to do, i want to recover the data on the disk and dont know if overwriting the partition table will erase it.... any tips on this?? Edited January 16, 2004 by sud_crow Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted January 16, 2004 Report Share Posted January 16, 2004 if lilo crashed, maybe half installed?...have you thought about restoring the windows mbr? win9x=fdisk /mbr xp/2k=fixmbr and/or fixboot when you ran the install, seeing the it was a win hd, linux had to make room for itself, no? Did it ask? what did you tell it? We don't have much info so it's difficult to help. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sud_crow Posted January 16, 2004 Author Report Share Posted January 16, 2004 HI, i know i didnt gave much detail as i didnt know what to write and hoped someone like you would ask some specific stuff just like that... :) I didnt runed "fdisk /mbr" because i wasnt sure if it would make me lose any data, and also as the problem is with the master slave disk and not the primary with the OS. Do you think it will solve the problem on a secondary disk? About the space for the install, my HD is partitioned in 3 right now, one for backup of important data, another for some windows games and the third was a blank ext2 partition. So the script asked for the device (wich i answered /dev/hdd5) and if i was sure i wanted to format it. Do you need any more information? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted January 16, 2004 Report Share Posted January 16, 2004 Windex does not see a linux drive....ever. The real question is if it shows up in the bios, then the drive is there. If windex tries to see a linux drive, it will ask you if you want to format it! Actually, the fact that it does not ask about the drive meas that it knows it is there, but that it can't see it. All windex tools will refuse to see any thing other than fat, fat32, and ntfs partitions. "Fixing" a partition table will most certainly result in a loss of data. If the mbr is all that is wrong, then your data should be fine. If you have the mandrake install cd (cd1), use it to restore your mbr, or even to reinstall lilo. Boot with it, at the splash hit F1, type "rescue" and select what you want to do from the menu presented. This is the Mandrake rescue mode, a niffty tool. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cannonfodder Posted January 16, 2004 Report Share Posted January 16, 2004 I have a funny feeling the partition is hidden... its a byte in the partition table. Not sure how to unhide it.. might be a fdisk (linux fdisk) option? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sud_crow Posted January 17, 2004 Author Report Share Posted January 17, 2004 It seems im not that good at expresing my self.... Here is the thing, the PC had two hard disks with vfat format (fat32) which were loaded with stuff (my father´s stuff) and i connected my HD wich had 3 partitions of which 2 are ext2 and one is fat32. Im naming the disks as follows: Disk one: 6gb (one fat32 partition) Disk two: 3.2gb (one fat32 part.) Disk three: mine It seems that the "disk two" has a problem (since we got it) with its MBR or partition table, and you cant boot any operating system from it. What i did was installing Damn Small Linux to one of the ext2 partititons in MY disk. When i runned the lilo install, and it tryed to write the partition table of the disks, seemed to crash, actually, it did crash. So i rebooted, and everything worked just fine (i just watched win98 boot), then i turned the PC off and went to eat something, when my father turned it on, he noticed that one of his drives was missing (disk two), so i got a bit nervous and started looking a solution and also a cause, i found out that fdisk and cfdisk detected the disk, but they didnt knew the format and reported some kind of error with the partition table and asked me to overwrite it or something like that, i didnt wanted to run the "mdk recover windows boot" from the cd as i didnt knew if that would cause any data loss... neither i run the fdisk /mbr for the same reason. I hope i made it a bit clear... if still isnt clear, please ask. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted January 17, 2004 Report Share Posted January 17, 2004 The real question is if it shows up in the bios, then the drive is there. does it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sud_crow Posted January 17, 2004 Author Report Share Posted January 17, 2004 Yes, it shows in the BIOS and it shows in cfdisk and fdisk. Its just not being recognized as a formated drive... i think. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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