Re: Help! FAT magic number corrupted!
On 16 Oct 1998, Rene Hojbjerg Larsen wrote:
> me wrote:
>
> > thanks, yes, this works, and i can run cfdisk fine. cfdisk works fine. I
> > didn't change anything, but i tried to write the partition table, and
> > here's the error cfdisk gives:
> >
> > "Wrote partition table, but re-read table failed. Reboot to update table."
> >
> > This was what it gave me originally when this whole mess started.
>
> Well, did you reboot? There's a very good reason fdisk emits that
> message. If you don't reboot before making any file system modifications
> (mkfs et.al.) there is a good chance that you hose the wrong part of the
> disk, since the kernel's idea of the partition layout is then different
> from the actual layout.
I rebooted. same thing. here's the output:
scsi: 0 hosts.
scsi: detected total. [this is usual when it's working.]
Partition check:
hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 <hda5 hda6>
[MS-DOS FS Ren 12, FAT 0, check=n, conv=b, uid=0, gid=0, umask=022, bmap]
[me=0x52, cs=0, #f=81, fs=0, fl=48384, ds=52400, de=55699, data=55972,
se=28213, ts=68224, ls=9471, rc=0, fc=4294967295]
Transaction block size= 512
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:01
[HANG]
> > Hmm. Why does it think I have 81 FATs on one partition?
>
> It seems that the file system on /dev/hda1 is hosed :-(
though i note that "81" appears in the output above (#f=81). wonder if
there's a way to fix this at a low level. no, scratch that, it's probably
a Bad Idea.
> > yep, i figured so. but right now I can't even get a Win95 boot floppy to
> > recognize my C drive (aka /dev/hda1). <sigh>
> > Could fips help me with that problem?
>
> Try removing the broken FAT partition with Linux fdisk. Then boot with
> the win95 boot floppy and run DOS fdisk to recreate the FAT
> partition--make sure that you have a copy of fdisk.exe on the boot floppy!
> It is also a good idea to have a Linux boot floppy handy, just in case...
sounds drastic. how likely is it that i'll lose the data on /dev/hda1?
(did i mention that during an ftp process, my backup got corrupted, and
/dev/hda1 (used to?) contain my only other copy of those files? <sigh>)
Talk about learning the hard way. I really need to corrupt that partition
as little as possible.
-Renee Landrum
slandrum@cs.smith.edu (main) ----- southern_grrl@iname.com (forwarding)
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