Re: [UUG/MLUG] WOOPS!

[Scott Greathouse <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Simply running /sbin/lilo solved everything. The MBR was the only thing
damaged by the Win98 rescue disk. I needed a DOS boot disk in order to do a
zero floppy disk install with a CheapBytes CD. The machine in question does
not dual boot, so a boot disk was the only way to get to a DOS command prompt.

Tymm Twillman wrote:

> Well, things *might* be recoverable to some degree.  Try running fsck
> manually on the root partition from your boot disk.  If this doesn't work,
> you may be able to at least recover some important (mostly text) files if
> you know some keywords; you can "less" the hard drive partition and use
> "/" to look for specific things and do some cut and paste, for text sorts
> of things.  There may be some better tools out there for doing some of
> this; I'm not really sure.  ext2fs does drop a bunch of superblocks around
> so there's a good chance that fsck can do a bit of recovery for you
> though.  At least it't the RH-installed binaries, etc. that will generally
> get blown away first in a situation like this...
>
> P.S. why did you need a DOS boot disk?
>
> On Fri, 5 Mar 1999, Scott Greathouse wrote:
>
> > I just gave ARC's web server a lobotamy, or so it seems. I'll tell you
> > the whole story, to educate the newbies (like me) and to entertain those
> > who will easily see where I went wrong...
> > All I wanted to do was upgrade KDE. So I used my Mandrake 5.3 CD, and
> > tried upgrading from the command line. When I got to kdebase, it told me
> > that I needed some Mandrake files to install it. The Mandrake files
> > refused to be installed, even with "--force" so I decided it would be
> > fine to just upgrade the whole thing, as I had done with my home system
> > the night before. So I needed a DOS boot disk... a fellow employee
> > generously offered me a Windows 98 rescue disk. Yes, this is where it
> > gets interesting. The Windows 98 rescue disk examined the hard drive and
> > noted that "Drive C:" was not a Windows partition. "Oh, well," it said,
> > "I'm going to write a big old stupid Microsoft thing to it anyway!" and
> > it proceded to do so. Then, when I tried to upgrade, the upgrade program
> > said that there was no kernel on my root partition, so it just couldn't
> > do an upgrade. I rebooted with a linux boot disk and the machine is
> > running quite nicely without a brain (serving up webpages, running SSH
> > and the whole 9-yards), but I would really like to recover the root
> > partition. I would also like to know how to mount a directory on my MLUG
> > account as an NFS drive so that I can "cp -a /home /nfsmount" thereby
> > keeping all of the user's stuff intact (including the httpd). I could
> > copy it all to a Novell machine pretty easily, but this would eliminate
> > the ownership information and permissions. A good explanation of what,
> > exactly, that Win98 rescue disk did to my poor machine might be
> > interesting, too.