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Re: How can sarge survive a Windows reinstall?



Why don't you boot in rescue mode, suggested some time ago, using a woody cd? The flavor of the boot software is inconsequential as long as it can read your hard drive filesystem and execute the grub program. You could use a really old boot floppy image, a Knoppix live cd, a Ubuntu live cd, or just about anything else that boots linux and lets you mount your hard drive.

-Ben

Hendrik Boom wrote:

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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