My son's system has 1 hard drive, 3 partitions, dual booting w98 & gentoo. /dev/hda1 - w98 /dev/hda2 - swap /dev/hda3 - gentoo /
it boots off grub on the mbr, the grub stage 1,5 and 2 and menu files are on /dev/hda3 I just rebooted to go into linux and got a grub error 17 which means it is unable to mount the partition, ie unable to mount /dev/hda3 to get its stage 1.5/2 files. I have now booted off a live cd to diagnose. I cannot even remember what filesystem was on there, it would have been ext3 or resiser. When I am in the livecd I tried to use file to see what was there. file -Ls /dev/hda1 & /dev/hda2 give the expected result (fat and linux swap respectively), but /dev/hda3 simply says "data" I cannot mount /dev/hda3, either with or without a -t parameter. Without -t mount tells me I need to specify a filesystem, using -t reiser or -t ext3 or -t ext2 gives an error about no such filesystem or incorrect superblock. Luckily the gentoo partition has no needed data, just the results of large number of installation and compilation hours. However if I can rescue it I'd like to try and do so, and I am curious to know how the filesystem got corrupted. Any diagnosis tips from here on in would be received gratefully. By the way I have booted it to windows via the good old fdisk /mbr from the win98 boot cd. Thanks.
