Topic awaiting preservation: OS Blues

I tidyed my room up yesterday.. and found a disk with my kernel source on it, something i've been looking for for a while so I could install the dirver for my ham modem in linux. So I did all this and got it all to work nice and tidy, but then went to boot up into windows 98 and got a Invalid system disk error please hit any key, I hit any key and it chucked me back into Lilo, If I chose windows It would give me the Windows Boot Loader where I could chose XP or 98, I could get into XP fine but 98 was a dead end, so I decided to reformat 98, I copyed all of my C drive onto my E drive which houses XP, my D:/ drive being my media drive,

I've re installed 98, only to find out it took the mbr with it, this includes LILO and my Boot Loader to get into XP oh yer and 98 can't find my D:/ patriton, DOS seems to be able too though and when I Dir it seems to simply have sys files on it.

Now my issue? well Im stuck in 98 and IM upset about my 11gig of files that were on my D:/ that seem to of vanshied.

Im limited as far as resources go, I don't have a working XP boot disk, the best i have in way of a boot disk is a 98 OEM Setup disk.
I don't have my XP CD-rom.

I need to be able to re install the WIndows Boot Loader either via dos or Windows 98.. then I'll be able to asses damage on the D:/ Drive and see if I can get my files back, but it would also be hnady to knwo of any freeware/shareware file recovery utilites too..

Anyone got any words of wisdom or help? im going to keep trudgeing along the internet trying to work out how to repair my boot laoder with out a XP Cdrom


Trigger

Well you could make/download a linux boot floppy or a linux cdrom.

Then just reinstall lilo it should be finding the other partitions by itself.

Reboot and you are back in business.

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Do something usefull: support Justice for Pat Richard

yeah, man.... Windows will bend your MBR over if you install Windows with grub installed... the only way I know of fixing it includes involved the linux boot disk.

However, both times that I have made the mistake, I have tried to reinstall *only* GRUB and I couldn't do it. Wound up having to reformat and re-install both OSs. Fortunately, I keep all my data on a 3rd partition called 'Slinky' (fat32) and it works regardless of OS mishaps...

... you might try finding a program for Win98 that browses both 'ext3' and 'ntfs' partition...


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Turns out some how, I deleted my patrton table and now Im rideing with a 5 gig fat32 patriton and my ext2, ntfs and secondary fat32 patriton have all gone bye bye. Where they've gone I dunno, but that was 60 gig of data and a lot of family photos.. family photos that werent backed up, so Im not the most popular of people atm

Cheers anyway

.... they're probably not gone...

Try using Partition Magic to find/manage them or (if the files were on a linux drive) you might simply reinstall Linux and use DiskDrake to not overwrite the '/home' and such...


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I ran into this problem three or four years ago and what I remeber is that you can put fdisk (from 98) on a start up disk and boot from it. Then fdisk will let you specify which partition to boot from. Set the boot partition to the Linux partittion and re-boot the machine. When the machine boots into Linux, re install lilo and set it up the way you want. That should restore the MBR to the way you want it.




-- not necessarily stoned... just beautiful.

Unfortuanlty they were gone, there was a 5 gig drive and then 55 gigs of formated erronos hard drive with bad clusters.. I had to repair them and then reformat over it .

Unforutanlty when ever I give Linux a test run I end up haveing to reformat because it nukes my windows setup..

:*(

Trigger

A Linux expert once told me that if I install Linux without much knowledge, chances are that I'd screw up my Windowses. So I never tried to install it in my computer.

I'm waiting until I have an 2nd computer, where I could install Linux for testing purposes, and then, after I mastered the installation process with multiboot with WinXP, I'd risk installing it along with my Windowses, in the main computer.

Ya'll should do like I did and put all your data on another partition... then you wouldn't really fear reformatting and re-installing except that you could better utilize this time getting hammered..


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