Howard Chin wrote:
I think the first thing I will need is to mount the HD so that I can have access to the HD. I can boot using a CD to a shell. There are a few important files that I want to rescue. If I can do that, the worse case is to reinstall the system which I can afford to do since I have only been building up my server and have not put it to any real work yet. I am newish to linux and am not quite sure how to mnt the HD. It will be much appreciated if someone can let me know how.
Once you're in a shell just do "mount /dev/(partition) /mnt". Your harddrive partition should now be mounted on /mnt.
From there you could do "chroot /mnt". This will change your current root to /mnt, so now it's as if you had successfully booted your system. From here you can run "lilo -vv" to reinstall lilo in the mbr, or "apt-get install grub" to install grub if you wish.
A note: The above will work fine if you only have one partition. If you have more than one, mount "/" first, then others.
ie: Say / is hda4, /usr is hda2, swap is hda1, and /usr/local is hda3 First "mount /dev/hda4 /mnt" then "mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/usr" then "mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/usr/local"In other words, mount parent directories first. If you want to, you may activate the swap partition with "swapon /dev/(partition)" hda1 in above example.
PaulNM