Looking at your setup, I'd say that you put the drives back in in the wrong order, so that sda - with the bootstrap - is now sdb. Whether you can recover from this now, I'm not too sure. Still worth a try though (:
Steve On Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:51:32 +1300 David Merriman <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. > -- Steve <[email protected]>
