Hosed Grub with the push of a button

[Jim Cornette]

max bianco wrote:
> That sounds reasonable but as you point out the FAT partition now
> occupies part of the LVM. I am wondering what kind of problems that
> will cause during an upgrade.

I would venture it would probably honor whatever the fstab referenced. 
unless disk druid was inquisitive by design to perform checks for out of 
the ordinary problems with the partition table. I don't think the 
developers of the program counted on some crazy button changing the 
partition table with one touch.

> I will back up the the few critical things, luckily there isn't much
> as the laptop is only a month or two(maybe) old, though I would like
> to restore F8 to working order at this point simply as a learning
> exercise, that parts of the LVM will be unreadable will impact this
> certainly but it looks like only the tail end is screwed, which would
> explain why I couldn't list the contents of some directories, they
> only contain mp3s, easily replaceable, but the rest of the user info
> appears to be intact so maybe i will come out ahead after all.

It depends upon what happened when you hit that button. Did it write 
over that portion of the disk or did it actually format the portion and 
place information from some storage chip on the mother board. It does 
sound that it ignored the lvm since I see LVMs as raw disk space in 
Windows. The magic button probably is as dumb as windows recognition is.
I guess since it is a mystery now what that magic button did, it will be 
a learning experience.
Don't be surprised if fdisk is acts out of order since it will encounter 
a messed up partition table. It might just remove references to the fat 
and leave the lvm limits untouched.
Interesting problem but not one you would want to happen.


> Once I get this mess straightened out, but before I upgrade to
> Sulphur, I am going to find out how deeply embedded this stupid Dell
> Media Direct Button is  in the system and try to nuke it. The thing
> is it should not have survived the installation of Werewolf, could
> this thing be linked to the BIOS? or was it a hidden partition? I
> used the entire drive to install F8, I explicitly indicated that the
> entire drive should be used, that all existing partitions should be
> deleted/removed. Looks like I have some homework to do.

My guess would be that the motherboard has a chip inside that has a 
compressed image of what was originally installed on the computer, like 
what a install CD would have. hitting that button probably launches the 
flash image which expands it from the end of the disk on forward. That 
would explain why it took over the tail end of the LVM partitioned off 
space. There are probably no safeguards for the routine to check first 
what is setup before going to town and doing its thing.
I think if you had a hidden partition it would be referenced in fdisk as 
a partition for diagnostics or something. I worked on a sony via where 
it was visible to fdisk as a compaq partition or something. I restored 
the computer simply by toggling the type to fat and making it active. It 
of course reinstalled over the whole disk and wiped out an excellent and 
fuly functional Fedora setup I had configured. It did put here OS back 
to factory settings though.

Back to the hidden partition, you removed everything. Storage mediums 
are getting pretty large capacity and since windows gets taken down by 
malware frequently the embedded restore facilities favor what was sold 
with the computer.

I am only guessing since the whole mess I would not have imagined some 
engineering group would develop. They did however.

Jim

> 
> Thanks
> 
> Max
> 


-- 
If only I could be respected without having to be respectable.