HD Install :: HD install failed and now hda5 and hda7 have gone!

First off, from what I understand, is that WinXP uses a filesystem that is not compatible with any other filesystem type. Secondly, if you install any OS to the hard drive (and DSL is no different) you will get a warning that all data will be lost on that partition (unless you are doing the frugal install but I don't know if you can do that with winXP).

First thing I would do is throw in the LiveCD of DSL and then run fdisk and display the existing partition table to see what it says. Just because DSL does not mount the partition does not mean it is not there (using the liveCD you can look in /mnt to see what partitions are listed to see if DSL recognizes them). If you installed DSL to hda7 to get data from hda7 then you shouldn't have there is a warning when doing an HD install that data will be lost. Was the disk flakey to begin with? Is it a SATA hard drive (I have seen some warnings about this on other posts)? As far as Windows not starting it is probably caused by the boot manager not being configured correctly. From re-reading your posts I see that you did a reinstall and had DSL up and running. try looking in /mnt by opening elmfm and navigating to /mnt and see what is there. click on the aterminal icon and type mount at the prompt to see what you get. Look for hda7. Which partition did you have suse on and why wasn't suse booting so you could get the data off? Just as a side note you need to run with the toram code to be able to free your cd/cdburner for burning a disk when running from live cd otherwise the cd is a filesystem that will not be available to unmount.

Quote (brianw @ July 04 2006,20:49)

First off, from what I understand, is that WinXP uses a filesystem that is not compatible with any other filesystem type.

Secondly, if you install any OS to the hard drive (and DSL is no different) you will get a warning that all data will be lost on that partition (unless you are doing the frugal install but I don't know if you can do that with winXP).

First thing I would do is throw in the LiveCD of DSL and then run fdisk and display the existing partition table to see what it says.

Just because DSL does not mount the partition does not mean it is not there (using the liveCD you can look in /mnt to see what partitions are listed to see if DSL recognizes them).

If you installed DSL to hda7 to get data from hda7 then you shouldn't have there is a warning when doing an HD install that data will be lost. Was the disk flakey to begin with?

Is it a SATA hard drive (I have seen some warnings about this on other posts)? As far as Windows not starting it is probably caused by the boot manager not being configured correctly. From re-reading your posts I see that you did a reinstall and had DSL up and running. try looking in /mnt by opening elmfm and navigating to /mnt and see what is there.

click on the aterminal icon and type mount at the prompt to see what you get. Look for hda7.

Which partition did you have suse on and why wasn't suse booting so you could get the data off? Just as a side note you need to run with the toram code to be able to free your cd/cdburner for burning a disk when running from live cd otherwise the cd is a filesystem that will not be available to unmount.

Hi brianw
I will try to respond to each point in your post.
I was running Windows 2000 not XP.

I tried to install DSL to hda7. Windows appeared to be on hda1 (at least when I viewed the files from DSL). And hda 5 and hda7 (the only other hda things that appeared in DSL) both seemed to have the suse stuff on them. As the file I wanted to save was on hda5, I decided to install DSL to hda7. Was this the correct thinnking? Then, I am rather confused that now DSL cannot see hda5 (nor hda7). Plus Windows 200o (hda1) is also not booting.

I cannot find anything named fdisk.

Using Emelfm I can look in /mnt. Among anything with "hd" in the name, there is hd/ and hda1/. Like I said before also from the mount tool there is only hda1 whereas before there was hda5 and hda7 too.

Was the disk flakey to begin with you asked? Not sure what that means, but, windows always booted up. It did however stop being able to shut down, without me holding down the power button. This started some time after another problem which prevented me getting into suse - I will explain below.

I don't know if it is SATA. It is a Toshiba satallite is that helps.

I had DSL up and running from the live CD. I can do live CD or "toram" without problems.

At aterminal type mount, you said. It says this:
/dev/roo on / type ext2 (rw)
/dev/scd0 on /cdrom type iso9660 (ro)
/dev/cloop on /KNOPPIX type iso9660 (ro)
/ramdisk on /ramdisk type tmpfs (rw,size=199400k,size=197046k)
/proc/bus/usb on /proc/bus/usb type usbdevfs (rw,devmode=0666)
dsl@box:[ a kind of squiggle I cannot find on my keyboard]$

Suse according to DSL seemed to be on hda5 and hda7. It wasn't booting because I had to give my username and password, everytime. That in itself was fine, but then several times it would not shut down, or crashed, and so I had to hold down the power button to turn it off. On one of these occasions, when I next turned it on, when typing my username and password it was as if my password was wrong. So I could never get back in since then. That is why I came to be using DSL, to try to save that one folder i wanted before erasing that OS.
Thank you
Justin

Quote (kerry @ July 04 2006,17:41)

justin can you post a copy of /boot/grub/menu.lst so we can see the settings for boot.

I tried typing that line into aterminal and it said "No such file or directory". I tried typing it into Emelfm and it said "not a directory". Perhaps I was meant to do something else with it?
Justini

Justin, I guess I should have spedified for fdisk (I usually forget to specify this point) that you would need to use sudo infront (i.e. sudo fdisk) (or more specifically sudo fdisk -l) which will list the partition table. You were correct to install to hda7 if the file was on hda5 (usually hda1 is the main partition, hda2 is the extended partition and logical partitions start at hda5). I am assuming since suse was installed that there is an hda6 but it is used for swap. The fdisk command should confirm this. Installing DSL (or any OS for that matter) should not destroy the partitions. The only reason that should happen is if something over wrote the partition table (since windows is corrupted as well something may have happened). The only thing I can think of for that is if there was some sort of wierd setup for the allocations (or something was corrupted and damaged). Did you do the original setup or was this done by someone else? I can't remeber seeing anything unusual about the toshiba that would indicate a weird setup.

The /boot/grub/menu.lst is a file you would view using a text editor but this would only apply after you installed and booted from the hard drive. With that system you probably are not dealing with a SATA hard drive.

Let us know about the partition table so we can figure out where to go from here.

Quote (brianw @ July 04 2006,22:32)

I guess I should have spedified for fdisk (I usually forget to specify this point) that you would need to use sudo infront (i.e. sudo fdisk) (or more specifically sudo fdisk -l) which will list the partition table.

So I do that, and it says:

Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 5 will be corrected by w(rite)

Disk /dev/hda: 20.0 GB, 20003880960 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2432 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 638 5124703+ b Win95 FAT32
/dev/hda2 639 2432 14410305 f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
dsl@box:[squiggle thing]$

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