by My laptop came with Windows 95 (which worked fine) and I wanted to make
it
dual-boot with Linux-Mandrake. Now it does not boot any more at all.
Here's
the details:
I used fips to shrink the Win partition and then fdisk (or cfdisk, I'm
not
sure; that was months ago now) to create Linux and swap partition.
The first problem appeared right away: Win95 would not boot any more.
It
never has since then. I can't reinstall it since the laptop has no CD
drive.
So I went ahead with installing Linux in the empty partitions. After
weeks of aggravation (caused by the need for a network install, since
there's no CD drive) that finally worked. Linux was finally
installed, configured and personalized.
Finally, after setting up booting with LILO (in the MBR) and including
an
entry for Windows I wanted to see if Win95 would work again. It did
not,
of course. LILO would try to load it, and no part of Win95 would ever
load. So I thought I'd try a DOS bootsector in the MBR. After all, I
can always boot Linux from floppy, and then rerun lilo. Or so I
thought.
After "FDISK /MBR" from a DOS floppy, Win would still not boot. I
thought, "OK, forget Windows for a few months and put LILO back in."
And then the trouble began. Linux would not boot any more either. I
used the
bootdisk made with mkbootdisk. It offers to boot from /dev/hda6 (rather
odd,
since there are only 3 partitions), then loads linux from floppy
anyway. Then
after some activity without access to floppy or HD, it detects the HD,
sees the
correct number of partitions thereon (3), and hangs about 1 second
later.
The last messages on the screen are:
autorun ...
... autorun DONE.
attempt to access beyond end of device
03:06: rw=0, want=2, limit=0
dev 03:06 blksize=1024 blocknr=1 sector=2 size=1024 count=1
EXT-fs: unable to read superblock
attempt to access beyond end of device
03:06: rw=0, want=33, limit=0
dev 03:06 blksize=1024 blocknr=32 sector=64 size=1024 count=1
isofs_read_super: bread failed, dev=03:06, iso_blknum=16, block=32
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:06
When I boot in to a floppy-distro of Linux (HAL91 in this case), I try
to see
the Linux partitions but no luck:
$ mount -t ext2 /dev/hda3 /linux
VFS: Can't find an ext2 filesystem on dev 03:03.
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda3,
or too many mounted file systems
On the other hand, mounting Windows that way works:
$ mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /windows
$ df
Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/root 3019 2264 602 79% /
/dev/hda1 253920 -42328 296248 -16% /windows
$ ls /windows
And "ls" and "more" display the Windows files correctly. Which is
ironic,
since with the Windows bootdisk I cannot get to the Windows files or
even the
partition. The funny "-16% used" seem to indicate a problem though.
Maybe the
partition table is corrupt?
Here is the fdisk output (Linux fdisk):
Disk /dev/hda: 64 heads, 63 sectors, 525 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 4032 * 512 bytes
Device Boot Begin Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 1 127 256000+ 6 DOS 16-bit
/dev/hda2 262 262 524 758016 83 Linux nativeQuote:>=32M
/dev/hda3 733 733 148 42336 82 Linux swap
That fdisk output looks fine to me.
Can anyone figure out what's wrong with this laptop? Maybe the
partition table
is corrupt? And what steps can I take to recover without reinstalling?
Thanks!
--
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