At Tue, 14 May 2002 22:12:11 +1000, Michael Still wrote: > On Tue, 14 May 2002, Manoj Mathew wrote: > > On Tue, May 14, 2002 at 05:55:47AM +1000, Michael Still wrote: > > > windows on it. The debian install crashed (something about libpopt), and > > > killed my partition table (dispite being past that in the installprocess). > > > > > > Does anyone have any hints on how to get it back? The data on the windows > > > partition has't changed, so hopefully it is just a case of recovering the > > > partition table and installing a new MBR.
> No, the install stopped when it said it couldn't find libpopt. It > surprised me, because this was my first time installing Debian, and I > expected it to just work... The Redhat installer is much sexier IMHO. wierd. perhaps your debian mirror was slightly out of wack? when you say "stopped", i presume it gave you some error message and allowed you to retry? > > Do you know partition sizes (in cylinders preferably)? If so, boot > > off a rescue rescue disk (or the Debian CDs in rescue mode) and > > recreate a partition table using fdisk, with the appropriate partition > > sizes and types for each Windows and GNU/Linux partition as before. > > Ahhh, it didn't turn out to be too bad... Partition Magic did it's thing. > My theory is that the install hadn't got around to installing LILO yet, so > the linux partition was marked 'active' but had an invalid boot record... that sounds quite likely, since the boot record is one of the last things to be written during the install.. if this happens again (?), just boot off the floppy disks or cd that you were installing off anyway, and then just go through the install again as usual. choose "mount an already initialised linux partition" rather than the default "initialise a linux partition" and it should find the files already installed and pick up from where it was. if you manage to go through the entire thing and for some reason skip only the boot sector step, you can also boot off the install media and choose the "rescue" option at the syslinux (or whatever lilo-replacement its using) prompt. something like "rescue root=/dev/hda3" (where hda3 is your linux /) should work. (incidentally, if you do actually lose your partition table at some point - not just your MBR - gpart (not parted) is an excellent tool for finding the formatted regions on the drive and rebuilding the partition table) -- - Gus -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
