Guest bulia Posted November 21, 2002 Report Share Posted November 21, 2002 I have a dual boot system with mdk 8.2 and win98, both fat32 and linux partitions. The bootloader is grub. Mandrake boots without a hitch and sees all partitions. Windows, when booting, complains about some trouble with the boot sector and launches scandisc. I kill scandisc and then windows boots fine and sees its fat32 partition. (I have no problem with that as soon as Linux works file, I rarely have to go to Windows.) But recently I tried to upgrade Mandrake to 9.0. When I boot from the CD, it complains that my partition table is "too broken" and offers to erase it destroying all data (!!!). Of course I decline, but somehow it cannot get past this point - the installer keeps returning to the dreadful "destroy all data or not" choice as if trying to scare me to death :) So, can anyone suggest what can be done in this situation? Unfortunately I have no spare harddrive where I could store my data and reformat the disk. Is there a SAFE way to fix the partition table (or whatever is the source of the problem) without risking to lose anything from any of the partitions? In particular, what is the "rescue" option in Mandrake 8.2 installation and what does it do? I want to know more about it before I try. Any help or pointers will be much appreciated! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest bulia Posted November 22, 2002 Report Share Posted November 22, 2002 One thing I forgot to mention: I have a Maxtor hard drive with the EZ BIOS (MaxBlast) installed. This is some software that was necessary for my old motherboard to see the full capacity of the disk. Can this be the source of the problem? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted November 22, 2002 Report Share Posted November 22, 2002 EZ Bios is the problem. There is no way to repair a partition table without destroying data. Maybe you need to try to purchase a burner and back up your data. I would focus on getting rid of the bios jazz. At this point in time, repartitioning and reformatting are the only viable options. There used to be a part of the utility that installs EZ Bios that will also remove it. But, the chances of loosing data are 50/50! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cannonfodder Posted November 22, 2002 Report Share Posted November 22, 2002 I would also look into purchasing a second drive, even over a burner (assuming its one or the other). Some advantages.. 1. Cheap (at least here in the USA) 2. Doesn't mess with your 1st hard drive. No worries about destroying windows. 3. Can be used as a backup. 4. More room. 5. You can dedicate it to linux, destroy it, do it again. You can use the free www.partimage.org (get the downloadable cd iso) and backup your windows partition to your new second drive. It's compressed so it doesn't take as much room. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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