Hi all, I've got a problem which I'm unable to fix, and I need a little help. I've done some fiddling, and now I can't boot up my machine any more. Here's the background:
I have two removable SATA drive bays in my PC. Normally I have two drives sitting in there, one with SuSE 10.3 (my normal system) and SuSE 11.1 on it, and the other with a single FAT32 partition with a bunch of video files on it. >From memory (I'm at work at the moment), the partitions are set up as follows: sda1 - 1GB boot partition sda5 - 2GB swap sda6 - 30GB SuSE 11.1 (/) sda7 - 60GB SuSE 11.1 (/home) sda8 - 20GB SuSE 10.3 (/) sda9 - 150GB SuSE 10.3 (/home) sdb5 - 160GB FAT32 Last week I bought a new drive, took out the other two drives, and plugged this one in. I intend(ed) to use this drive as a playpen, just to mess about with different flavours of Linux, and so far it has PCLinuxOS, Mepis and Linux Mint on it. That worked fine. Later I put my original drives back in, intending to boot up SuSE 10.3 again, but the system stopped after the BIOS check, with the word 'GRUB' in the top-left corner. Now normally it says 'GRUB Loading Stage 1.5' (I think), and half the time it will hang at that point anyway, requiring a reboot, but it's always done that (that may be a symptom in itself). This time it just said 'GRUB', and stopped. I assumed that GRUB or some part of the boot sequence had got corrupted (don't ask me how, the drives were just sitting on the desk until I plugged them back in...), so I booted off my SuSE 11.1 DVD, selected 'Boot from hard disk', and was then able to boot from the hard disk as usual. I then tried using the recovery utilities on the DVD to fix the boot issue, and that's when things started to get worse. I first ran the automatic recovery utility; it said some part of the boot sequence was incorrect, and attempted to fix it. I was still unable to boot, so then I tried the manual recovery method, trying various combinations of booting from the Master Boot Record, from the boot partition, the root partition, rewriting the MBR, etc. etc. Long story short, no matter what I tried it wouldn't boot up, and now I'm at the point where I can't boot at all, and I'm stuck. I wasted over 3 hours on it last night, and I've exhausted my admittedly limited knowledge (and patience). Short of reinstalling, I dont' know what else to try, so I'm hoping that one of you kind souls will be able to have a look at this machine for me, and hopefully get it back into a working state. I'm happy to pay for your time in whatever fashion you prefer, money, blank disks, whatever. If anyone is able to help, I'd be most grateful. As I say, I'm at work at the moment, so I can't run any commands on the machine for you, but I'll try and answer any other questions you may have. Thanks, David Merriman -- Hardware: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked.
