Linux Gurus:
Thank you very kindly for your suggestions. I have tried the active
partition item and it did not work.
I failed to tell you that when I installed LILO (at the installation
of the Caldera Linux), I installed it to the natvie linux partition
/dev/hda3. I was not sure that would work, but it was an option in
the Caldera Installation and it all worked fine for several weeks.
When viewing the disk with the MSDOS FDISK, it showed that the active
partition was the first partition (/dev/hda1). After changing it to
partition 3 (/dev/hda3) and rebooting, the error message about
"Missing operating system" was still there. Then going back into
FDISK (MSDOS) changed the active partition back to 1 (/dev/hda1).
After rebooting this, it boots back into Win98.
I am thinking that when Win98 did this thing to the disk, it some how
corrupted something on the linux partition (/dev/hda3) such that it
is necessary to run fsck. The reason I think this may be the case,
is after booting with the emergency disk created after the fact
(described in Caldera's FAQ), I get an odd error that says something
like "Kernel Panic:VFS:unable to mount root fs on 03:03". This
suggests to me that it is having difficulty reading the linux partition
and it needs to run fsck. Another item that suggests this is that
while in Win98, trying to read the linux partition with the tool
explore2fs.exe reports a read error.
Do you have other suggestions about how I might recover the Linux data.
While it was nice to boot back to Win98, I really need the linux stuff.
I guess next time I will install GRUB instead of LILO.
Thanks for your help.
> >Linux Gurus:
> >I have an odd problem. I have a machine (Compaq) with a 10G disk
> >that has been partitioned with hda1 as Win98, hda2 as Linux swap,
> >and hda3 as Linux native.
> >The Linux is Caldera 2.4. While in windows something odd happened
> >and it went out to lunch (stupid MS). Upon rebooting, the error of
> >"no operating system" is obtained. I assume this means that the
> >problem is LILO has gotten corrupted.
> >Attempting to boot with the Linux Rescue floppy yeilds an error:
> >"Kernel panic unable to mount root fs on 03:03"
> >I am guessing that perhaps the file system may need to be checked
> >before mounting (ie run fsck). How do I recover and get around this
> >problem? I have tried copying fsck to the boot floppy (on a different
> >system), but when I run in in the boot shell, I get segmentation fault.
> >Thanks for your assistance.
> Are you certain that the "no operating system" message begins with a
> lower case n? What is the exact message?
> Well, if it is "Missing operating system" this is an error message
> from a standard DOS MBR, when no boot signature is present in the
> active partition. Then there is a chance that the Windows boot problem
> is as simple as setting hda1 active using DOS fdisk.
> You have the option to get Findpart at
> http://inet.uni2.dk/~svolaf/utilities.htm
> do
> findpart all +fat fp.txt
> and post the content from fp.txt.
> --
> Svend Olaf
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