LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Tarek Heiland <tarek@bakas.com.au>
  To  : 'Mark Williams' <hirm@chariot.net.au>
  Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1999 18:30:39 +0930

RE: Biiiig LILO problems....

Did you ever try finding someone running NT to try and mount your drive on.
This probably would have saved you losing data before you started fiddling
with dangerous things like partition tables. (and probably annoyed the hell
out of your NT4 running symbiont as it upgrades all his NTFS drive to the
new version :)). Even installing W2k on a different drive and then mounting
your damaged drive may have sufficed. 

It is possible to install Win2k onto other partitions as well as an
alternative multi-boot install. 

In your case you has to do more than just reset the MBR. Obviously this gave
you access to the NT Boot loader again, but I suspect the remainder of your
boot files were damaged (ie boot.ini). Running Win NT setup in repair mode
can and will repair such problems. If you are game you can do even edit
boot.ini - it is very logical although somewhat cryptic at first glance)

You mentioned having an NTFS partion. If so, playing with your disk editors,
repair tools is the absolute very last thing you should ever do.  I suspect
this is what killed your NTFS partition. I doubt very much if the NT OS
resulted in any direct loss of Data, even if unbootable. I agree, reviving a
buggered unbootable NT system can be a nightmare, especially as MS assumes
that you have other NT PC's lying around, but it can always be done. 

At worst you may have to re-install software and re-configure your NT
system. This usually happens if you let the repair process play with the
registry.

All this probably won't help you now. However as you are persisting with W2k
it may be of some future use. 

Note that W2k is really really memory hungry and that you may wish you were
back in win 95 some time in the near future. BTW the MMC (Microsoft
management console sux absolutely - It is like the Windows help system - it
goes a step backwards with every implementation)

Tarek




-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Astill [mailto:brian.astill@flinders.edu.au]
Sent: Sunday, 19 September 1999 18:02
To: linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
Subject: Re: Biiiig LILO problems....


At 12:35 AM 18/9/99 +0930, Mark Williams wrote:
>Hi guys...
>
>Thanks for all the input, but unfortunatly it all went to waste :(
>
>But when the MBR was fixed and win2k was booting i got the dreded blue
>screen of death whihc said "invalid boot device" :(
>After a couple of shots at trying to fix that, i found my NTFS parition had
>dissapeared. I tried everything i could think of to revive it (using Disk
>Edit, disk repair utils, etc), but nothing worked :(
>I lost all my docs, my brothers yr12 docs, and my dads auto cad files. My
>fault i guess for not keeping a backup and trusting win2k to keep data safe
>:P
>
>Soo... here i am writing this email in a new install of win2k rc1.
>
>Anyway... i found some cool new stuff in win2k i think you hard-core linux
>server admins should worry about.

My goodness, you MUST be compliant!
If my OS had destroyed all my data, I'd have been screaming louder than a
stampeding bull elephant.
There is NO way I'd allow an OS that offered a proven risk of devastation
anywhere near any server.

Yet you are so happy you wish to share your joy with us.
I'm glad you're happy. 

BiBi
Brian

Brian Astill,  Visiting Research Fellow
Flinders University Institute of International Education

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