hi paolo,
we probably were the ones who repartitioned the hd you mentioned and installed mdk92. i'm actually guessing but since you now work for the same client where we did it, i'm probably right. just the same, i have some comments here on your problem.
please take note that partition magic was used to shrink the original xp partition and that was it, all linux partitions were created afterwards. i don't think partition magic did wrong. the partitions were in the right places and mdk92 worked fine until it was upgraded to 10.
i noticed you forced the head count to 255. it was not a safe move to
do. you can actually manually check it first and see where heads start
and end. in other words, you can visually check partition consistency before doing anything else. and, you just don't change the hd geometry as recorded in the partition table. if the original head count was not 255, by changing it, you may have damaged data in all partitions since
cylinder (and partition) boundaries will have changed as well. in fact your succeeding
post may already indicate misplaced partition data caused by wrong partition pointers.
i guess whatever kernel you use it will always follow existing partition boundaries or hd geometry and wouldn't touch it unless you tell it so. your xp boot problem was probably caused by a misplaced lilo.conf entry. an update i did before on another system did not boot windows because the update script entry did not properly point to the windows partition.
your post was 2 days ago so i hope you were able to recover your / by
now. re ur xp, it might be best to back it up first; you can just move
out the hd to a desktop and back it up or 'ghost' the partition. i just hope xp was not damaged when you changed the hd head count.
just in case you're still at it, you should first establish the original
head count. you can do this by serially scanning the first cylinder and
look for the xp PBR. that should be in the first sector of cylinder 1 so with that you can already compute for the head count. if it is not 255, then you should put the computed value back. now working on your mdk10, since you've lost your /, try booting from the install cd in rescue mode and do your fdisk, fsck, mount, lilo, etc. from there.
hth
willie
Paolo Alexis Falcone wrote:
Here's the problem:
The machine I've got to recover is an IBM Thinkpad R32 of which the Windows partition was resized by Partition magic to accomodate a Linux installation (mandrake 9.2). When it was upgraded to mandrake 10 windows XP won't boot up so an attempt was made to fix the problem - unfortunately using `sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread --force -H255 /dev/hda` as I thought it was reminiscent of the Fedora Core 2 issue some months back as Mandrake 10 uses linux kernel 2.6.
Unfortunately this didn't seem to alleviate the problem one bit as it further escalated the problem as now I can't access the partition containing the root filesystem.
Here's how the partition order is: hda1 (ntfs) | hda3 (/boot, ext3) | hda5 (swap) | hda6 (/, ext3) | hda2 (IBM recovery, vfat)
Fortunately I've been able to find the rest of the partitions except for hda6. gpart doesn't help much as the latest version of gpart can't seem to find the partition type signature of hda6. I'm not sure if the fact that the linux partitions were accomodated using partition magic is a culprit, but I haven't encountered yet such setups until now. I've already found the rest of the partitions (fortunately I made a backup of the partition table in paper), but I still can't mount or fsck the contents of /dev/hda6's filesystem.
Any hints as to how I could find where the partition started and ended? When I tried `cat /dev/hda6` I could still see the filenames along with the binary content. I'm not sure if I made a mistake with finding the sizes of the rest of the partitions which might be the reason why I can't find where /dev/hda6 started (and the next problem would be finding where the filesystem superblock resided inside /dev/hda6).
Paolo Alexis Falcone [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
-- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
