Help! Messed up my MBR (PROBLEM SOLVED!!!)
Thanks goes out to all who responded to my plea for help.
After reading everyones mail and falling back to a phrase we use
in the Military "when all else fails, read the instructions!" I
have my P90 back up and going again!
I checked out my boot directory and found the following files:
boot.0300
boot.0301
boot.0341
The date on boot.0300 was time stamped with the time I had a brain
cramp and executed lilo on the wrong machine. I felt pretty confident
that issueing /sbin/lilo -u /dev/hda would take care of the boot sector.
I ran the above command and all went well!
Now came the time to repair the damage done to /dev/hda1. The time on
boot.0301 looked like the time I tried to make the most of my mistake
and get lilo to boot my linux partition on /dev/hdb1, except I fat
fingered my lilo.conf and set boot=/dev/hda1 which messed up some partition
information I guess.
Next I ran /sbin/lilo -u /dev/hda1
I got a message saying that the time stamp of the file didn't match the
time stamp written to /dev/hda1 and told me to use the -U option if
I knew what I was doing! By now I have nothing to loose. The time
stamp looked good on boot.0301 so I took a bet that this contained the
status of /dev/hda1 before I started mucking around with everything
trying to get lilo to boot linux on /dev/hdb1.
I went for it and ran /sbin/lilo -U /dev/hda1. Several messages displayed
saying that the records were restored ... said a little prayer and hit
CTRL_ALT_DEL. I never thought I'd be so glad to see the words Starting
MSDOS!
My hat goes off to the people who are in charge of the lilo program. I
did not use dd to back up the contents and I am glad that lilo saves the
FIRST change of a device to a file for you! Now I understand the
importance of doing this with dd and I have learned a great deal in
this experience!
I would not have cared if this machine was not my machine at work. We have
some software on here that our IT dept. is in charge of and they would have
had to come in and wipe my disk clean and reinstall their "standard client"
software and charge our group bucks to do so. Not to mention that I (a Software
Engineer) would have to explain how I did such a foolish thing.
Thanks again to all who responded. If any of you come through
Lynchburg Virginia send me e-mail and I owe you lunch!
Now I just have to figure out why the kernel I built (which got me into this
mess) can't find the root file system ...
Thanks again,
Brian
p.s. sorry for talking so long. I'm just very thankful that everything
turned out well.
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