Help: Dual boot recovery from RHFC2 installation bug failure

Jim Cornette fc-cornette at sbcglobal.net
Fri Jul 16 02:42:40 UTC 2004


Mikael Konttinen wrote:
> All,
> 
> Since nobody has replied to my earlier post, please let me narrow the
> question down a bit:
> 
> After FC2 installation bug WinXP boot failure and recovery according
> to the SFDISK method, but stuck with a XP that boots half-way but
> fails at Mup.sys; Do you think it's safe to format the WinXP
> partition reinstall WinXP without risking to mess up the partition
> table and/or loose data on the data partitions?

This all seems to be user dependent. You have to be aware of the 
reformating actions during the XP install.
> 
> Please reply, I'm not sure how the disk geometry is written on disk
> and what risks re-partitioning after the FC2 installation bug there
> might be.
> 
> 
> Thanks in advance But, WinXP itself is not booting further than 
> Windows\System32\drivers\Mup.sys when in Safe Mode.

This seems to take forever when entering safe mode. I think that it will 
eventually pass this delay. I thought that the system was hung when I 
first saw this in safe mode before. You might want to look up what mups 
does on the Internet.


> 
> If neccessary, I can sacrifice my current WinXP installation and 
> reinstall it, but I'd prefer to get it running. What I'm really
> worried about is loosing any data on hda7/8 and I'd prefer not to be
> forced to back up ~100GB of raw audio and video along with scans and
> documents on DVD-R/W... and especially when not used to burning media
> on Linux.
> 

If you partitioned your machine with this layout. I assume you could be 
cautious. Running a backup on the important data is probably the best, 
incremental or full.

> I'm not sure how disk geometry works so that is why I haven't dared
> to reinstall WinXP in case the other partitions are blown to bits in
> case the disk is repartitioned or otherwise disk geometry is again
> rewritten during WinXP installation.
> 

> Running a Samsung SP1614N 160GB on a Shuttle motherboard with nForce2
>  chipset. No third party software has been used. No other ways 
> attempted for recovery, apart from the sfdisk operations mentioned,
> so I hope everything is still intact.
> 
> Very very thankful for help!
> 
> 
> Yours
> 
> Mkn.
> 
> 
> Ps. I'm not sure what the empty hda4 partition is doing there, but I 
> guess that's because only three primary partitions are used..?

It looks like it represents zero to infinity :-) -

  Being that it starts at cylinder 0, it might be the effects of damage 
to your boot sector.
  I think that /dev/hda2 contains your valued partitions, as a container.

My idea is to boot into XP and enter the command shell. Then fix the 
mbr. PLEASE do a backup for that much valued data before loosing this data.

>   Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1          0+   1019    1020-   8193118+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda3   *   1020    1032      13     104422+  83  Linux
/dev/hda2       1033   19456   18424  147990780    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5       1033+   1096      64-    514048+  82  Linux swap
/dev/hda6       1097+   2039     943-   7574616   83  Linux
/dev/hda7       2040+  14787   12748- 102398278+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda8      14788+  19456    4669-  37503711    7  HPFS/NTFS

/dev/hda4          0       -       0          0    0  Empty

Jim

-- 
Pardon this fortune. Database under reconstruction.





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