Boot problem

[Eric "Shubes"]

Let me begin by thanking Michael, Kenneth, Alan, Joseph, and Darrin for 
their replies. We value everyone's input. Remember, what's right is 
important, who's right is not. ;) Now on to the matter at hand.

First thing I'd do at this point (we almost did this yesterday) is 
double check jumper settings, and try conventional 'master' and 'lone' 
settings if CSEL was in use (as Alan and Joseph suggested).

If that doesn't solve the issue, it would be prudent to do what Darrin 
and Michael have said: Get your data off the drive before trying much 
(anything) else.

Given that the old drive is still accessible from linux, I would do this:
.) get a new IDE HDD of equal or larger size (I hate to say this part, 
at Fry's).
.) "# dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=4096" from knoppix to copy the 
entire old drive to the new one (making darn sure of your drive letters 
- check with qtparted first).
.) disconnect the old drive and put it in a safe place.
.) attempt again to make the new drive bootable (if it doesn't already).
.) if previous step fails, build a new system on the new drive (the way 
you really want it!), then install the old drive and copy (or dd) over 
anything you want to keep from the old drive.

Joe, let me know if you'd like to talk it over.

Michael Sammartano wrote:
> I would say  hda is bad. The table on this drive has disapeared and you cant boot from it. Try removing hdb and try to boot. hda5 is the active partition, or at least it was. It should boot from there even though it is not labeled /
> Does the BIOS recognize the drive size correctly upon boot? I would get another drive (brand new) and use the cd it comes with and mirror copy the entire disk, partition by partition. Relabel the partitions, and you should be good to go. Do not try to write to the old disk anymore, this will incur data loss..
> ---- joe <joe at tlnf.com> wrote: 
>> .
>> Michael Sammartano <volinaz at cox.net> wrote: (Tue, 01 Aug 08:32 -0700 ??)
>>> ... Drive failure. The partition table is not 
>>> capable of retaining the data writen to it. The drive needs to have 
>>> a recovery done on it to recover the data, further trials on the 
>>> drive will render the useful data useless. I do not understand the 
>>> constant cat and mouse game on this issue. ... If there is a physical 
>>> issue, it can not be fixed. 
>> Which drive do you think has failed?  And how can one confirm that? 
>>
>> hda is an older 8-gig drive, but it is the one that is now booting
>> and it apparently has the MBR on it.
>>
>> hdb is a fairly new 80-gig drive, and we can still read all the 
>> data on it by booting with a Knoppix live CD. 
>>
>> Do you think I could install a Linux system on hda and then 
>> restore lilo in the MBR on it and thereby access both drives? 
>>


-- 
-Eric 'shubes'