Re: Help! FAT magic number corrupted!
On Fri, Oct 16, 1998 at 09:07:14AM -0400, me wrote:
> Hi all---
>
> I'm new to Linux, and in the process of hacking cluelessly with my
> hard-drive setup I've managed to trash some vital part of my hard drive.
> Here's the general setup:
>
> /dev/hda1 (~100MB) Win95, formerly bootable, formerly DOS
> /dev/hda2 (~16MB) linux swap
> /dev/hda3 (~200mb) linux main: bootable, mounted as /
> /dev/hda4 (0)
> /dev/hda5 (~75mb) linux /var
> /dev/hda6 (~250mb) linux /usr
>
> a few days ago, i was hacking on something (LILO?), and flipped the
> "bootable" flag on /dev/hda1 to OFF. I also changed /dev/hda1 from a DOS
> partition to a Win95 FAT16 LBA partition, not thinking that this might
> pose a problem. (/dev/hda1 has win95 loaded on it, but I corrupted all the
> long filenames when I was repartitioning it. when it was labeled as a DOS
> partition, I could get into it using linux.) cfdisk returned an error as
> it was trying to write; silly me, i didn't write down what it said, but i
> figured nothing was seriously wrong. I rebooted. when I rebooted, I got an
> error:
>
> Kernel Panic: [something to the effect of, this drive's f*ed up] 03:01
<MORAL> NEVER play with the partitions on a system without making a
backup! </MORAL>
<MORAL2> Always mount a scratch monkey </MORAL2> (yes I read the jargon
file too much)
Have you tried looking at it in normal fdisk?
How AFU is the partition table?
> I looked around and found a rootboot disk on the net (tomsrtbt), dutifully
> created it using another computer, and booted from a floppy. (My Debian
> rootboot disk wasn't working, still isn't, dunno why. <sigh>) Using a boot
> floppy, I can mount and read /dev/hda3 just fine, but I can't seem to run
> any of the binaries on it. (for example, cfdisk). I can't get into
> /dev/hda1 at all.
tomsrtbt is a GREAT disk but...alas it is libc5 and thusly can't run
glibc binaries (libc6).
try cd'ing to the directory where /dev/hda3 is mounted and
chroot . bash
this SHOULD give you a shell that can run those binaries.
(and its bash too ;))
> So: is there a way to fix the hard drive, and /dev/hda1, without losing
> significant amounts of data? If so, what is it?
have you tried fsck?
I would recommend trying fdisk and seeing what it says...also writting down
every error message ;)
(btw tomsrtbt should have fdisk)
As for the Win95 system...
you will probablky need to re-install
-Steve
--
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