[ale] hard drive horrors

[Mike]

I've had better luck using loadlin when shuffling my Linux install amongst 
various partitions. 
Make a dos boot floppy, copy a kernel and the loadlin program to it and boot 
the floppy. Assuming your kernel is named bzImage and the root partition is 
/dev/hda2 do:

loadlin bzImage root=/dev/hda2 ro vga=3

now you can easily try booting other partitions in the event you've forgotten 
where you put Linux.
After you're in, fix lilo.conf to get Linux booting, then add the "other" 
entry to boot the Windows. Is it Win9x or NT on hda1? If it's NT, you may be 
happier getting NT fixed first and then using NT's boot loader to boot Linux.
-M 



On Thursday 26 April 2001 12:57, Jim Philips wrote:
> I have been trying all week to move over to a new 30 gig Western Digital
> hard drive. All Windows files were copied. All Linux files were copied. I
> made tons of rescue disks, boot disks and whatever and armed myself with
> printed copies of how-tos on hard drive upgrades and lilo failures. And
> everything I try is failing.
>
> 1. made a boot disk with the mkbootdisk utility. This insists on booting
> hda3, but Linux is now on hda2. Editing files on this disk has no effect.
>
> 2. made a boot disk that copied my old /boot directory, but with updated
> lilo.conf and ran lilo on this disk, per instructions in the hard drive
> upgrade mini how-to. This disk will get so far in booting and then returns
> "ran out of input".
>
> 3. used Tom's root/boot disk to log in and mount hda2. I can do this fine.
> The lilo how-to says you should run lilo with the "-r" flag to chroot lilo
> and execute it for the mounted partition. This fails, because lilo can't
> find execvp.
>
> 4. tried to boot from an old boot disk and it causes a kernel panic.
>
> 5. in desperation, tried to reinstall RedHat with a minimum install, so it
> would run lilo and create a new boot disk. This gets to the "preparing to
> install" phase and then just ceases to do anything. It can clearly access
> the new hard drive, but it quits at the point mentioned.
>
> Everything looks good when running fdisk in Linux. I have a Linux native
> partition and a swap partition. If I run e2fsck on the partition, it checks
> out fine. Windows also refuses to boot, because it doesn't seem to like
> changes made with the Linux version of fdisk. I ran FDISK /MBR at the DOS
> prompt and this just made things worse. I am running out of ideas and the
> documentation is certainly no help. I can still re-install the old hard
> drive to do repair work, but I am completely out of ideas.
>
> Any suggestions?

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