On Tue, 14 May 2002, Angus Lees wrote: > 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?
Well, I was installing of this rediculously large 8 CD woody set that a friend copied for me. He has successfully installed from it, so perhaps the copy is dodgy. The installer retried, but failed anyway. > > 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.. Hmmm, perhaps this is a poor design choice. I would think you would only mark a partition active at the point where you know it canbe booted from... I imagine my granny woud be quite confused if this happened to her when she installed (apart from the fact that she'd dead, and would therefore be confused about her possession of a PC). > (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) Noted for future use... Yeah, the Debian install felt a lot like the old FreeBSD text install they had last time I built a FreeBSD box (about a year ago). I'll give it another try in a couple of days. Cheers, Mikal -- Michael Still ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) UMT+10hrs -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
