Man I've royally screwed up my computer

Man I\'ve royally screwed up my computer

Hmm, my laptop sems to not be wroking...Wonder why that is? I put an 8 gig or so partition on it and tried installing linux. After deciding that linux doesn't like me, I delted the partition. THat went fine. Then, I expanded my primary NTFS partition to include the free space. Shouldn't be a problem as the linux partition was created AFTER my primary partition. However, I woke up this morning, checked the laptop...had disk boot sector invalid. Well great. I don't want to simply reformat and use recovery disks because I have a bunch of un-backed up stuff on there. Well, maybe not a bunch, but enough that it would be real annoying trying to get it all back.

So, I will be trying to boot from a disk, and perhaps fdisking my master boot record and hoping it will reconstruct that. That, or I will be getting a laptop-> desktop hard drive converter in the next few days, I will try sticking the laptop hard drive in here and then using partition magic to move stuff where it is supposed to be. Just because the boot sector is invalid shouldn't mean the whole hard drive is gone. It SHOULD still recognize the hard drive if I boot my normal hard drive up. We'll see I guess......

This is real annoying because this computer's monitor sucks horribly. IT turns off after a random interval between 1 and 5 minutes. I am currrently typing most of this message with the monitor off because it turned off after a few lines. Rather annoying huh?

I guess if I can read the laptop harddrive, or boot off a CD and get the ethernet to work I can transfer all my stuff via network to the desktop and then I'll at least have all the install files handy and a list of everything I need to get.

I guess we'll see in the next few days...

Spud

Re: Man I\'ve royally screwed up my computer

Best place to go for computer help is:

http://computing.net/

If you are using XP: have fun.

Getting Linux functioning on a laptop is an iffy proposition. Much depends on the distro you are using. I never cared to attempt installing linux on the disk windows is on, as I saw too many horror stories on how things were screwed.

Re: Man I\'ve royally screwed up my computer

I had a similar situation but stuck with Linux and rewrote the boot sector. In your case, this link might help.

Re: Man I\'ve royally screwed up my computer

Hey Tater,

Try "FDISK /mbr"

Good luck getting it sorted out. This is my only bit of possibly useful info, and that's if you had installed LILO with your Linux install.

LILO rewrites your boot sector and no amount of normal FDISKing will get it back. /MBR is an undocumented switch for FDISK that will restore your boot record without FDDISKing your whole drive.

edit: ah, you knew that already. so nm, but good luck anyway!

Re: Man I\'ve royally screwed up my computer

I've NEVER had any luck getting Linux and Windows to co exust. One always takes over the other...

My experience/understanding with partitions (but you seem to know what you're doing so maybe I'm wrong) has been that, when using Fdisk, everything is unreversable...resize a partition and all your data is toast--add a partition and everything is toast, you get the picture...but I haven't had to do much FDisking since this became a Windows 2000 house.

Here is what I would do:
Install windows again. On the same drive/partition as the other windows...what this will do is it will fix your MBR without the help of partition magic. Don't install any extras, just enough to boot windows...then you can get windows up, back up everything that needs backed up, and blow the whole drive away.

I think once you blow everything away you could probably do the Lunix/Windows mating dance and if you're real lucky get them to both work--I've heard install Lunix first I've hears install Windows first so who knows

Good luck and if you don't get it up soon I'll make Tree send you my 21" CRT (Joking)

Re: Man I\'ve royally screwed up my computer

Sorry to hear about your experience Saaby. Maybe I've been lucky, but I've been using dual boot pcs for at least 6 years with at least three different distributions of Linux. These days, though, there's almost no reason to keep the Windoze stuff alive. One more 2Gb partition got converted to Linux on a workstation just last week.

fdisk /mbr definitely works. Write it down somewhere other than in a computer file. When you need it you won't have any hope of reading that file!

Re: Man I\'ve royally screwed up my computer

...When you only have 3Gb total ...

Re: Man I\'ve royally screwed up my computer

tater, does this happen to be an XP machine? If so, you can boot off the xp cd to the recovery console and do a "fixmbr". I've done it twice, works fine. Once you get over this problem, don't give up on linux. I'm running XP and Mandrake linux on the same physical drive, works good. I had more luck with GRUB as a boot loader instead of LILO.

web page

Re: Man I\'ve royally screwed up my computer

Ahh, but the problem is I cannot find my recovery disks It is XP, and maybe I can find somebody with their own XP disk that I can use. If not, I can always have somebody download XP for me and put it on a CD to use, but I am sure somebody around here has it on CD. I will have to check, and hopefully it will work as this old celeron 466 is kind of annoying sometimes. It is usually fine once everything gets loaded though.

Spud

Re: Man I\'ve royally screwed up my computer

XP=Product Activation...

Good luck

Re: Man I\'ve royally screwed up my computer

If it's just the boot sector that's messed up, you might want to try to boot off a floppy disk start up your system. Find another system running Window XP and format a floppy disk on that system. It will not work if you format the disk on Windows 98. Copy 3 files to the floppy disk from the Windows XP system: boot.ini, ntldr, and ntdetect.com. Take the floppy to your dead machine and try booting it up. This trick works for NT and Windows 2000. I haven't tried it on XP.

Re: Man I\'ve royally screwed up my computer

Hmm, so how do I boot to command line? I tried the boot floppy, it worked, then said the following file was missing or corrupted: <windowsroot>\system32\hal.dll So, I copied that to floppy and tried running it again, same thing. So, how could I boot to command line and copy that hal.dll to the right folder from the floppy?

We are a bit closer.... If I can boot to command line I can also try the fdisk /mbr, but I don't know how to get that far. It DOES seem like it is TRYING to boot though. Now if only I could get the thing to go to command prompt.

Any hints welcome.

Spud

Re: Man I\'ve royally screwed up my computer

You can create floppy boot discs from within XP. I had a hard drive failure and took me forever to figure it out. I just booted off the System CD and after a few hundred tries got in to command prompt to run a disk diagnostics. Found out the drive was bad.

When XP crashes, it crashes hard and is unforgiving, make sure you create floppy boot discs if you have an XP system (I think I even downloaded them straight from Microsft)

Re: Man I\'ve royally screwed up my computer

I can't find my recovery disks so I cannot boot off the cd We'll see what happns soon.

hopefully it will work

Re: Man I\'ve royally screwed up my computer

Have you checked in Fdisk to make sure the active partition is set to the NTFS volume?