digitalmars.D - [OT] Emergency: Getting my boot back!!
- "Matthew" <matthew hat.stlsoft.dot.org> Feb 02 2006
- "Walter Bright" <newshound digitalmars.com> Feb 02 2006
- "Matthew" <matthew hat.stlsoft.dot.org> Feb 02 2006
- Sean Kelly <sean f4.ca> Feb 02 2006
- "Walter Bright" <newshound digitalmars.com> Feb 02 2006
- Sean Kelly <sean f4.ca> Feb 02 2006
- John Reimer <terminal.node gmail.com> Feb 02 2006
- "Matthew" <matthew hat.stlsoft.dot.org> Feb 02 2006
- John Reimer <terminal.node gmail.com> Feb 03 2006
- Alex Stevenson <ans104 cs.york.ac.uk> Feb 02 2006
- "Kris" <fu bar.com> Feb 02 2006
- "Matthew" <matthew hat.stlsoft.dot.org> Feb 02 2006
- "Matthew" <matthew hat.stlsoft.dot.org> Feb 02 2006
- "Ameer Armaly" <ameer_armaly hotmail.com> Feb 02 2006
- John Reimer <terminal.node gmail.com> Feb 03 2006
- James Dunne <james.jdunne gmail.com> Feb 02 2006
- Sean Kelly <sean f4.ca> Feb 02 2006
- John Reimer <terminal.node gmail.com> Feb 03 2006
- S. Chancellor <dnewsgr mephit.kicks-ass.org> Feb 02 2006
My laptop is WinXP, and I had Linux on it. I've only tried the Linux a couple of times, since the shared FAT partition I hoped would enable me to work with both OSs always came back corrupted in XP's eyes. GRUB is (was) the loader The first 500MB is the first partition, which is FAT. Stupidly, last night I tried to run CONVERT on it, to make it NTFS, and then changed my mind before (I thought) it had done anything. Now it won't load. All I can get is the GRUB command screen, and I know *nothing* about how to get back my partition from there. Or, if I use the WinXP recovery disk, I can get into the woop-de-doop management console (i.e. a crippled DOS box) and I *nothing* about how to get back my partition from there. The C:\boot.ini file is still ok. If anyone knows how to tell the MBR or whatever to "go windows" and see C:\boot.ini, I would be **massively** grateful. Many thanks in advance Cheers Matthew
Feb 02 2006
I know this won't be a helpful comment at this point, but over and over I hear about the grief people have from running multiboot systems. What I do is just buy a cheapo extra box, and then use a KVM switch. It has a nice side effect that you can run them simultaneously.
Feb 02 2006
"Walter Bright" <newshound digitalmars.com> wrote in message news:dru2fi$1lkb$1 digitaldaemon.com...I know this won't be a helpful comment at this point,
Correct. ;-)but over and over I hear about the grief people have from running multiboot systems. What I do is just buy a cheapo extra box, and then use a KVM switch. It has a nice side effect that you can run them simultaneously.
I do have such a thing, which allows me to multipleplex between 1 (5-way multi-boot, all Windows, no dramas) desktop, server, Linux box and Mac OS-X laptop. The problem was encountered on my laptop. I'd installed the Linux boot over a year ago and abandoned attempts to use it. It's just that I was stupid enough to start messing with the boot partition on a machine on which there was uncomitted data - code and three chapters! - while in the last two-week high-pressure phase of trying to get my book finished. Not smart, eh? :-(
Feb 02 2006
Sean Kelly <sean f4.ca> Matthew wrote:The problem was encountered on my laptop. I'd installed the Linux boot over a year ago and abandoned attempts to use it. It's just that I was stupid enough to start messing with the boot partition on a machine on which there was uncomitted data - code and three chapters! - while in the last two-week high-pressure phase of trying to get my book finished.
So long as you can boot from something and the disk hasn't been set on fire, getting data back typically isn't a problem. Worst case you lose an afternoon reinstalling Windows to get at the data. Not that it's an afternoon you can afford to waste, but better than rewriting three chapters :-) Sean
Feb 02 2006
"Matthew" <matthew hat.stlsoft.dot.org> wrote in message news:dru2pj$1lsh$1 digitaldaemon.com...The problem was encountered on my laptop. I'd installed the Linux boot over a year ago and abandoned attempts to use it. It's just that I was stupid enough to start messing with the boot partition on a machine on which there was uncomitted data - code and three chapters! - while in the last two-week high-pressure phase of trying to get my book finished.
The only thing I can suggest is getting one of those "disk image" utilities and create an image of your laptop drive onto your main system. Then, search it for strings in the data you want to save, and snip it out and reassemble it by hand.
Feb 02 2006
Walter Bright wrote:I know this won't be a helpful comment at this point, but over and over I hear about the grief people have from running multiboot systems. What I do is just buy a cheapo extra box, and then use a KVM switch. It has a nice side effect that you can run them simultaneously.
I'm coming to believe VMWare is an excellent low-cost alternative. And it will be even more attractive once Intel's hardware VM support and dual cores becomes more prevalent. As for Matthew's problem... my first thought was "fdisk /mbr" to rewrite the boot record, but I think MS left fdisk out of XP. Here's a link that describes how to restore the boot record another way, along with a few other tips: http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-10877-6031733.html Sean
Feb 02 2006
Matthew wrote:My laptop is WinXP, and I had Linux on it. I've only tried the Linux a couple of times, since the shared FAT partition I hoped would enable me to work with both OSs always came back corrupted in XP's eyes. GRUB is (was) the loader The first 500MB is the first partition, which is FAT. Stupidly, last night I tried to run CONVERT on it, to make it NTFS, and then changed my mind before (I thought) it had done anything. Now it won't load. All I can get is the GRUB command screen, and I know *nothing* about how to get back my partition from there. Or, if I use the WinXP recovery disk, I can get into the woop-de-doop management console (i.e. a crippled DOS box) and I *nothing* about how to get back my partition from there. The C:\boot.ini file is still ok. If anyone knows how to tell the MBR or whatever to "go windows" and see C:\boot.ini, I would be **massively** grateful. Many thanks in advance Cheers Matthew
I assume you no longer care about the Linux install. Can you try going into the the Windows Recovery Console and using the "fixmbr c:" command? Here's a site that explains some of the commands available in the console:http://www.windowsnetworking.com/j_helmig/wxprcons.htm
In the long run, it may be safer and easier to run a linux distribution in Vmware's free vmplayer tool. That way you can run Linux from your windows desktop. It's a quick and effective way to work with Linux these days, especially if you don't want to compromise your partition setup with a dual OS install. Hope that helps, John
Feb 02 2006
"John Reimer" <terminal.node gmail.com> wrote in message news:dru2ui$1m0q$1 digitaldaemon.com...Matthew wrote:My laptop is WinXP, and I had Linux on it. I've only tried the Linux a couple of times, since the shared FAT partition I hoped would enable me
work with both OSs always came back corrupted in XP's eyes. GRUB is (was) the loader The first 500MB is the first partition, which is FAT. Stupidly, last night I tried to run CONVERT on it, to make it NTFS, and
changed my mind before (I thought) it had done anything. Now it won't load. All I can get is the GRUB command screen, and I know *nothing* about how to get back my partition from there. Or, if I use
WinXP recovery disk, I can get into the woop-de-doop management console (i.e. a crippled DOS box) and I *nothing* about how to get back my
from there. The C:\boot.ini file is still ok. If anyone knows how to tell the MBR or whatever to "go windows" and see C:\boot.ini, I would be **massively** grateful. Many thanks in advance Cheers Matthew
I assume you no longer care about the Linux install. Can you try going into the the Windows Recovery Console and using the "fixmbr c:" command? Here's a site that explains some of the commands available in the console:http://www.windowsnetworking.com/j_helmig/wxprcons.htm
In the long run, it may be safer and easier to run a linux distribution in Vmware's free vmplayer tool. That way you can run Linux from your windows desktop. It's a quick and effective way to work with Linux these days, especially if you don't want to compromise your partition setup with a dual OS install.
The boot partition is (or was) C: The WinXP OS partition is D: I've tried "fixboot X:" and "fixmbr X:", with C and D serving as different permutations of X, but to no avail. It keeps whittering about not being able to find "<Windows root>\system32\hal.dll", which would obviously trouble the little dear. I'm going to try "fixmbr multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)" and "fixmbr multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\Windows", after which I truly have no clue. Oh dear, I *really* don't want to reinstall this friggin thing. Any other ideas?
Feb 02 2006
Matthew wrote:The boot partition is (or was) C: The WinXP OS partition is D: I've tried "fixboot X:" and "fixmbr X:", with C and D serving as different permutations of X, but to no avail. It keeps whittering about not being able to find "<Windows root>\system32\hal.dll", which would obviously trouble the little dear. I'm going to try "fixmbr multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)" and "fixmbr multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\Windows", after which I truly have no clue. Oh dear, I *really* don't want to reinstall this friggin thing. Any other ideas?
Well, I'm glad you figured it out. I couldn't remember how to correctly access the drive using those commands. Seems strange you have to reference the correct partition with such a long string. -JJR
Feb 03 2006
Booting from an XP CD into the recovery console and trying 'fixmbr' and 'fixboot' commands might be useful. http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/bootcons_fixmbr.mspx See also fixboot and diskpart links on that page. The fixXXX commands don't seem to be available in normal XP console, but only on the recovery console. If you can't get anything to boot, pulling the HD and getting it into another machine to recover is probably easier than trying to reinstall without killing data. I've had very good results with GetDataBack from www.runtime.org - not free, but I've used it and it does work - especially on systems which just have a dead MBR and all the data is intact. Matthew wrote:My laptop is WinXP, and I had Linux on it. I've only tried the Linux a couple of times, since the shared FAT partition I hoped would enable me to work with both OSs always came back corrupted in XP's eyes. GRUB is (was) the loader The first 500MB is the first partition, which is FAT. Stupidly, last night I tried to run CONVERT on it, to make it NTFS, and then changed my mind before (I thought) it had done anything. Now it won't load. All I can get is the GRUB command screen, and I know *nothing* about how to get back my partition from there. Or, if I use the WinXP recovery disk, I can get into the woop-de-doop management console (i.e. a crippled DOS box) and I *nothing* about how to get back my partition from there. The C:\boot.ini file is still ok. If anyone knows how to tell the MBR or whatever to "go windows" and see C:\boot.ini, I would be **massively** grateful. Many thanks in advance Cheers Matthew
Feb 02 2006
Alex Stevenson wrote:Booting from an XP CD into the recovery console and trying 'fixmbr' and 'fixboot' commands might be useful. http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/bootcons_fixmbr.mspx See also fixboot and diskpart links on that page. The fixXXX commands don't seem to be available in normal XP console, but only on the recovery console. If you can't get anything to boot, pulling the HD and getting it into another machine to recover is probably easier than trying to reinstall without killing data. I've had very good results with GetDataBack from www.runtime.org - not free, but I've used it and it does work - especially on systems which just have a dead MBR and all the data is intact.
AFAIK, corrupted MBR doesn't mean that all data on the partitions is lost - MBR is just a static area for boot loader code. Unless that convert-utility has messed up with the file system, recovery is easy. You can put in a Linux live-cd and run grub-install or use an advanced 3rd party boot loader or simple install the MS boot loader using the recovery CD. -- Jari-Matti
Feb 02 2006
Can you remove the laptop hard-drive, and plug it into another machine as a second disk? You'll need a 2.5" to IDE adapter cable to hook it up to a desktop machine ... the drive does not need to be bootable for doing that, and you say the files appear to be intact. This would at least allow you to make a backup of your work. - Kris "Matthew" <matthew hat.stlsoft.dot.org> wrote in message news:dru0dd$1k15$1 digitaldaemon.com...My laptop is WinXP, and I had Linux on it. I've only tried the Linux a couple of times, since the shared FAT partition I hoped would enable me to work with both OSs always came back corrupted in XP's eyes. GRUB is (was) the loader The first 500MB is the first partition, which is FAT. Stupidly, last night I tried to run CONVERT on it, to make it NTFS, and then changed my mind before (I thought) it had done anything. Now it won't load. All I can get is the GRUB command screen, and I know *nothing* about how to get back my partition from there. Or, if I use the WinXP recovery disk, I can get into the woop-de-doop management console (i.e. a crippled DOS box) and I *nothing* about how to get back my partition from there. The C:\boot.ini file is still ok. If anyone knows how to tell the MBR or whatever to "go windows" and see C:\boot.ini, I would be **massively** grateful. Many thanks in advance Cheers Matthew
Feb 02 2006
No, but that's not a prob anyway, as I always do multi-partitions, and so all the essential work is on the H: drive. So the work's never really *gone*, just a couple of days of installation away. Sort of good news, of course, but not really "Kris" <fu bar.com> wrote in message news:dru61f$1o51$1 digitaldaemon.com...Can you remove the laptop hard-drive, and plug it into another machine as
second disk? You'll need a 2.5" to IDE adapter cable to hook it up to a desktop machine ... the drive does not need to be bootable for doing that, and you say the files appear to be intact. This would at least allow you
make a backup of your work. - Kris "Matthew" <matthew hat.stlsoft.dot.org> wrote in message news:dru0dd$1k15$1 digitaldaemon.com...My laptop is WinXP, and I had Linux on it. I've only tried the Linux a couple of times, since the shared FAT partition I hoped would enable me
work with both OSs always came back corrupted in XP's eyes. GRUB is (was) the loader The first 500MB is the first partition, which is FAT. Stupidly, last night I tried to run CONVERT on it, to make it NTFS, and then changed my mind before (I thought) it had done anything. Now it won't load. All I can get is the GRUB command screen, and I know *nothing* about how to get back my partition from there. Or, if I use
WinXP recovery disk, I can get into the woop-de-doop management console (i.e. a crippled DOS box) and I *nothing* about how to get back my partition from there. The C:\boot.ini file is still ok. If anyone knows how to tell the MBR or whatever to "go windows" and see C:\boot.ini, I would be **massively** grateful. Many thanks in advance Cheers Matthew
Feb 02 2006
Many, many thanks for all the suggestions. I am back and running. The fixboot and fixmbr did the trick, it was just that I also needed to make the partition list correspond with what was expected in boot.ini. Rest assured I am *never* trying any of that again, and will be purchasing Ghost and/or PartitionMagic (- any opinions on either/alternatives??) forthwith. Thanks again. Very very happy bunny here. You're all getting a credit in my book! :-) Cheers Matthew
Feb 02 2006
"Matthew" <matthew hat.stlsoft.dot.org> wrote in message news:dru7qu$1pjn$1 digitaldaemon.com...Many, many thanks for all the suggestions. I am back and running. The fixboot and fixmbr did the trick, it was just that I also needed to make the partition list correspond with what was expected in boot.ini. Rest assured I am *never* trying any of that again, and will be purchasing Ghost and/or PartitionMagic (- any opinions on either/alternatives??) forthwith.
these kinds of things.Thanks again. Very very happy bunny here. You're all getting a credit in my book! :-) Cheers Matthew
Feb 02 2006
Matthew wrote:Many, many thanks for all the suggestions. I am back and running. The fixboot and fixmbr did the trick, it was just that I also needed to make the partition list correspond with what was expected in boot.ini. Rest assured I am *never* trying any of that again, and will be purchasing Ghost and/or PartitionMagic (- any opinions on either/alternatives??) forthwith. Thanks again. Very very happy bunny here. You're all getting a credit in my book! :-) Cheers Matthew
One wonderful application I bought is called bootitng, by Terabyte. It's a very highly rated (though little known, perhaps) partition, backup, and boot manager. I think it's less expensive and more powerful, in some ways, then PartitionMagic/Ghost. It's backup features might not be quite as comprehensive as Ghost's, but it's other features do well to make up for any lack. Have a look here:http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/
There's also a more complete disk imaging software there. The one provided with booitng is good, but does not run from within windows, so some people might prefer to purchase the image application also. -JJR
Feb 03 2006
Matthew wrote:My laptop is WinXP, and I had Linux on it. I've only tried the Linux a couple of times, since the shared FAT partition I hoped would enable me to work with both OSs always came back corrupted in XP's eyes. GRUB is (was) the loader The first 500MB is the first partition, which is FAT. Stupidly, last night I tried to run CONVERT on it, to make it NTFS, and then changed my mind before (I thought) it had done anything. Now it won't load. All I can get is the GRUB command screen, and I know *nothing* about how to get back my partition from there. Or, if I use the WinXP recovery disk, I can get into the woop-de-doop management console (i.e. a crippled DOS box) and I *nothing* about how to get back my partition from there. The C:\boot.ini file is still ok. If anyone knows how to tell the MBR or whatever to "go windows" and see C:\boot.ini, I would be **massively** grateful. Many thanks in advance Cheers Matthew
If you'd like to run Linux, but not have to deal with the (apparent?) messiness of dual-booting, you can check out http://colinux.org/. It's a fabulous tool that allows you to run a slightly modified Linux kernel (pre-compiled disk images available for boot) *alongside* Windows. It's not virtual PC technology; the two are actually running cooperatively alongside each other. You get a nice Linux console popping up on your Windows desktop. You can even share disk partitions between the two systems. Very cool. I've also heard of another tool called Xen that fits into this category, but I don't know much about it. I have a dual-boot Gentoo and Windows XP system, and it's fantastic! I'm running in Gentoo right now. All my data is on NTFS partitions (since it can handle files >2GB and I have a lot of video). Also, I use a special multi-track USB 2.0 audio interface which works flawlessly in both systems, to which I was quite shocked (on the Linux side at least)! Last thing: I've also seen an NTFS project for Linux which makes use of the original Windows binary driver for the filesystem. Apparently, someone had enough free time to completely reverse engineer all the undocumented APIs involved in the usage of file systems on Windows. I'd like to try this out, as I've heard it can perform all the functions that the native Windows driver can - including write support which has been a problem for Linux (and still is). If you'd like some help getting kicked off in the right direction, I can definitely help. -- Regards, James Dunne
Feb 02 2006
James Dunne wrote:If you'd like to run Linux, but not have to deal with the (apparent?) messiness of dual-booting, you can check out http://colinux.org/. It's a fabulous tool that allows you to run a slightly modified Linux kernel (pre-compiled disk images available for boot) *alongside* Windows. It's not virtual PC technology; the two are actually running cooperatively alongside each other. You get a nice Linux console popping up on your Windows desktop. You can even share disk partitions between the two systems. Very cool.
That's awesome. If it runs faster than VMWare I'm sold.I've also heard of another tool called Xen that fits into this category, but I don't know much about it.
I scanned their web page quickly--it seems to be a high-performance virtual machine. So likely not as integrated as coLinux, but more flexible. Sean
Feb 02 2006
Sean Kelly wrote:James Dunne wrote:If you'd like to run Linux, but not have to deal with the (apparent?) messiness of dual-booting, you can check out http://colinux.org/. It's a fabulous tool that allows you to run a slightly modified Linux kernel (pre-compiled disk images available for boot) *alongside* Windows. It's not virtual PC technology; the two are actually running cooperatively alongside each other. You get a nice Linux console popping up on your Windows desktop. You can even share disk partitions between the two systems. Very cool.
That's awesome. If it runs faster than VMWare I'm sold.
From my experiences, colinux is fast at the command line stuff. But don't expect to see it run X windows very well (vmware is much better optimized for that). X Windows programs have to be run through a local network interface on colinux (using a separate X server service on win32) and, as a result, are really quite boggy. Furthermore colinux can be a real pain to setup correctly on some machines (check out their wiki sight!). If you have tons of time and patience on hand, colinux is for you. Otherwise vmware is the safest bet. Colinux does serve a nitch, though, and it's quite well performing and fun to use for certain tasks... especially compiling. -JJR
Feb 03 2006
On 2006-02-02 14:20:01 -0800, "Matthew" <matthew hat.stlsoft.dot.org> said:My laptop is WinXP, and I had Linux on it. I've only tried the Linux a couple of times, since the shared FAT partition I hoped would enable me to work with both OSs always came back corrupted in XP's eyes. GRUB is (was) the loader The first 500MB is the first partition, which is FAT. Stupidly, last night I tried to run CONVERT on it, to make it NTFS, and then changed my mind before (I thought) it had done anything. Now it won't load. All I can get is the GRUB command screen, and I know *nothing* about how to get back my partition from there. Or, if I use the WinXP recovery disk, I can get into the woop-de-doop management console (i.e. a crippled DOS box) and I *nothing* about how to get back my partition from there. The C:\boot.ini file is still ok. If anyone knows how to tell the MBR or whatever to "go windows" and see C:\boot.ini, I would be **massively** grateful. Many thanks in advance Cheers Matthew
Why can't you get your data back under a linux boot disk? -S.
Feb 02 2006