Hi Nick, Can you not boot an gentoo or mandrake or knoppix cd in rescue mode to check or mount your filesystems?
*/ EVIL /* quick check of systems use partition magic 8.0 on the EVIl-os DOS If you boot from a mandrake 10.0 install CD you could PRETEND you were doing an install up to the stage of partitioning choose custom partitioning and get a nice GUI showing the drive systems (DO Not Complete). then if it all looks ok ctrl-alt-del and nothing will have been installed. If the filesystem look OK grub might need reinstalling? Regards Michael On Sat, 14 Aug 2004 16:04, 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.
