Hi,
I hate to ask for this sort of thing but it sometimes goes with the
territory.
My wife's PC is a dual boot machine with Debian Syd and Windows XP pro.
due to what appears to have been a bad IDE cable and some other things I
won't go into, it has gotten into a state where Grub can't boot XP (the
default OS) and might not be able to boot Debian either.
The reason why I say "might not", and the whole point for posting, is that
both
my wife and I are blind and can't read the error messages from Grub. We
are able to load speech output software once the OS is loaded, and I have a
Ubuntu Feisty CD here with built-in speech software which I can use to
alter the Grub configuration, but I cannot actually read Grub's output at
all. I can see when there are things on the screen so I have some idea if
it is booting or has failed some kind of test, but I can't actually read
anything.
When I had a pair of eyes here yesterday, two things were happening. The
first was that Grub was seeing the drives the wrong way around. This is a
bit of a moving target as the Ubuntu Cd seems to bring them up in a random
order, but I think I have fixed this by changing the device map file under
Grub. But I can't verify this.
The second error was that the filesystem for the Windows partition was
being listed as unknown and it refused to boot it. This has me more
worried. I've been reading things online about LBA and such, but I'm
perhaps a little worried that maybe the partition has more serious problems
with it. Any suggestions on how to fsck NTFS partitions would be helpful.
I can mount the partition under the Ubuntu live CD however so it's not
completely messed up.
The other thing that was happening is that the probe for the drive would
fail at times, so I bought a new IDE cable for it today. Hopefully that
problem is now solved.
My wife is growing increasingly frustrated. I'm reluctant to take the PC
to a shop because in all likelihood it's a Grub issue and my chances of
finding a computer lab where they know about Grub are not that high. So
I'd be having to do the direction on that and here I have other PCs with
speech software to search the web with - in a shop I'd have nothing.
So right now what I really need is a pair of eyes to help with screen
output. Technical knowledge is not really an issue, though of course it
would be useful. Only prerequisites are the ability to read and speak
English, plus some patience. Sorry, I don't really speak much Hebrew and
I'd rather not go through my wife on this sort of stuff.
If anyone is able to help or can provide more light on my problems, please
feel free to write back or call me on 052 853 2827
Geoff.
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