Nick Rout wrote:
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.
What does fdisk -l /dev/hda say? Is /dev/hda3 still marked as Linux? If
not there'd be no problem marking it as linux.
fdisk /dev/hda
p ( for print )
t ( label! )
3 ( partition number )
83 ( linux )
w ( write )
Any low level guru's think this'd be a bad idea??
Steve
