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Re: How can sarge survive a Windows reinstall?



On Tue, Mar 01, 2005 at 09:17:44PM -0500, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 01, 2005 at 12:24:44PM -0500, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 01, 2005 at 04:37:51PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> > > On Tue, Mar 01, 2005 at 11:33:23AM -0500, Justin Pryzby wrote:
> > > 
> > > sarge does not have a rescue mode. I've written one, but it's still a
> > > bit experimental and came too late for sarge.
> > > 
> > > -- 
> > > Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@debian.org]
> > 
> > Thanks. Colin.  That message will saved me a lot of futile tries.
> > 
> > Now I have two questions.  First, an earlier one,
> > 
> > How do I make a sarge boot floppy?  I don't think I had that option
> > when I originally installed sarge long long ago.

Sorry, I was tired last night ans didn't give a very detailed post.

> I managed to use mkboot to make a boot floppy.

After installing lilo,  but not running it.

> Unfortunately. it doesn't work.
> I gather from the kernel panic that it can't read my root partition.

The exact messages are:

VFS: Cannot open root device "303" or unknown-block(3,3)
P;lease append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(3,3)

I cpresumed, without knowing for sure, that "303" meant my root partition
/dev/hda3.  Specifying
	linux root=/dev/hda3
on the boot: line didn't help.

> However, the root partition is perfectly readable when I boot form the MBR
> on my hard disk.
> 
> This is ridiculous.  Is it really impossible boot a sarge system after the MBR
> has been clobbered -- without a complete reinstall?

Sorry for the angry language.  I still haven't clobbered my MBR, haven't
reinstalled Windows, but have spent several days trying to make sure it will
go OK.  And, as I said yesterday,

> Everything I've tried so far has failed.
> 
-- hendrik
> 



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