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Ruined boot sector on X20/W2K

DISCUSSION I Lee Hetherington 3 participants 3 messages Jan 30, 2001 – Jan 31, 2001 1 message not in the archive

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#1 lore raw

If Mandrake used LILO to install, there very well might be a backup in /boot/boot.0800 or something like that. You might want to consult the LILO documentation and/or a net search to see if they say how to restore this (probably using dd).

If you have real W2K media, it has boot floppies and a CD. You can boot from floppy to access the CD, and then run recovery mode. It might be able to fix this up. Then again, it might demand that you had made an emergency recovery disk from within W2K, something I learned the hard way once.

--Lee Hetherington

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#2 lore raw
Quoted 5 lines · I Lee Hetherington

If Mandrake used LILO to install, there very well might be a backup in /boot/boot.0800 or something like that. You might want to consult the LILO documentation and/or a net search to see if they say how to restore this (probably using dd).

Quoted 8 lines

If you have real W2K media, it has boot floppies and a CD. You can boot from floppy to access the CD, and then run recovery mode. It might be able to fix this up. Then again, it might demand that you had made an emergency recovery disk from within W2K, something I learned the hard way once.

--Lee Hetherington

Yes. Just get back up using the floppy boot disk that you must have made. Then look in /boot. You should see boot.0800. This is 512k in size. It is the original boot sector. Now, make damn sure that you know the raw device used to boot the machine!

It is probably /dev/hda if you have IDE drives or /dev/sda if you have SCSI, just do od /dev/whatever and if the Disk drive LED comes on, you have found it.

Then, simply:

	cp /boot/boot.0800 /dev/whatever

Since boot.0800 is already the correct length, you don't have to use anything else.

Cheers,
Dick Johnson

Penguin : Linux version 2.4.0 on an i686 machine (799.53 BogoMips).

"Memory is like gasoline. You use it up when you are running. Of course you get it all back when you reboot..."; Actual explanation obtained from the Micro$oft help desk.

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#3 lore raw
In reply to I Lee Hetherington

[Richard B. Johnson]

Quoted 2 lines

Then, simply:

	cp /boot/boot.0800 /dev/whatever

Ah, but that reverts the partition table, which may have been changed since first installing lilo. To avoid this, just type 'lilo -U', which does much the same thing but without touching the partition table.

Peter
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