Once I reinstalled, I saw the default boot order again and figured out I hit win7 rescue, not win7, which might explain the rest of it. The HD is fine and no damage was done to the win7 programs, since I didn't give it much time before I hit ctrl-alt-del.
I guess the real lesson here is don't use win7 rescue (it shows up in grub 2 as "Vista loader") until you have backed everything up in any other OS you might have on your computer. Now, I wonder. *Is there a way to boot Win 7 from VirtualBox in Ubuntu if Win 7 resides on a partition?* On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 3:08 PM, Robert Citek <[email protected]>wrote: > On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 3:05 PM, Mike B. <[email protected]> wrote: > > Okay. Couldn't access sda3 or sda4 at all. It appears that wrecking the > > superblock wrecks the OS. Nice. > > Usually, the filesystem keeps backup copies of the superblock: > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext2#ext2_data_structures > > That your system 1) was booting Windows and not Linux, 2) had a > problem with the ext4 superblock on Linux, and 3) could/did not use > the backup copy indicates that there may be something more serious > going on. > > Some possible explanations: > 1) Windows did something weird to a filesystems unfamiliar to it. > 2) the hard drive is going bad > 3) a bug in the ext4 driver > 4) something else > > > I tried a number of different methods of > > restoring Ubuntu from ubuntuforums.org and nary a one worked. When I > booted > > gparted it managed to see 9.10 as an operating system, but /home was just > > formatted blank space. > > Ouch! Sorry to hear you lost your /home. > > Dunno what they said on the forums, but the general rule is to first > figure out which partition holds what, check to see which ones need > fixing, then fix those partitions. For example: > > # get a listing of the partitions > $ sudo fdisk -l > > # get a listing of the partitions, UUIDs, and filesystem type > $ sudo blkid | sort > > # check filesystem status, e.g. if sda3 is an ext2/3/4 > $ sudo e2fsck -n /dev/sda3 > > # repair filesystem > $ sudo e2fsck /dev/sda3 > > > Lesson: Don't be a moron. If I boot a system, let it boot. > > That would be a conservative approach. Although, I have my doubts > that interrupting the boot process caused the problem. I routinely > interrupt Linux at various points in the boot process and have done so > with several different distos. Never had a problem. LInux handles > those types of interruptions rather gracefully. > > Regards, > - Robert > > -- > Central West End Linux Users Group (via Google Groups) > Main page: http://www.cwelug.org > To post: [email protected] > To subscribe: [email protected] > To unsubscribe: [email protected] > More options: http://groups.google.com/group/cwelug -- Central West End Linux Users Group (via Google Groups) Main page: http://www.cwelug.org To post: [email protected] To subscribe: [email protected] To unsubscribe: [email protected] More options: http://groups.google.com/group/cwelug
