Quick question before the boards go down and I go to sleep. I have a Linux install on this computer that I haven’t booted in at least a year and I need the hard drive space.
The problem is that I built this computer and installed Linux on it about 4 years ago and I don’t remember what kind of setup I used. I know I have two hard drives in here and I’m almost sure that one is 10GB and one is 20GB, but it looks like it’s showing a total of 40GB.
You have one 30 GB drive (Disk 0, C:) and one 10 GB drive (Disk 1, unformatted). The 10 GB drive can be formatted with NTFS. No need to delete the partition. Right click it and choose “Format”. There should be no harm to doing a “Quick Format”.
In case you’re worried by the above post, there are two physical disks with only one logical partition each so there is no need to (and no ability to for that matter) “reallocate the space back to [a] main partition.”
I just rebooted for the first time since I started this thread and it doesn’t look good. I get:
Verifying DMI Pool Data.....
Grub
And then nothing. Can’t type, etc.
I gather that Grub is a boot loader but I never used it, I used LILO. Anyone know how to fix this so I can get back on my computer (I’m on my girlfriend’s laptop now)?
You can still save your system. But I would recommend you wait for other opinions from some more posters after me before taking further action cause I’m not sure I’m right.
The partition you just reformatted was the active partition, which meant it housed your master boot record (MBR). So you are going to have to figure out how to write a new boot record. Take a look at this site, Windows 2000 / XP Recovery Console it seems to explain how you can do it with the setup disk. This link XP: Repair or Fix Master Boot Record Using Recovery Console also describes it and it seems you only really need to do is stick in your xp cd, choose recovery option, then type fixmbr. I wonder if you can make your winXP disk the active partition and write the MBR to it instead of the 10GB disk?
If for some reason you can’t use winXP to create a new MBR, you can always reinstall linux on the hard drive and lilo will pick up winXP again.
Well, I don’t know if you could do this with a win98 cd, I would try to do this with linux. I would try to set up lilo again in my MBR, but in such a way that I could then remove linux and lilo would still be on it. Once again, I would hope for some others to give opinions on this before you try it. Perhaps there is some way others now about to recover the MBR without all the h
The first thing I’d do is try to set your winXP cd as the active. I would physically set it as the primary, master hard drive. Since you built this computer, you should know how to do this.
I would then make the 10GB disk the secondary drive (or slave on primary line).
Reinstall linux (it can be a very abbreviated version of it as we are going to delete it later).
During this linux install, choose the option to write lilo to the MBR. Since the winXP disk is now the primary drive this should write the MBR on it. Make sure during the installation lilo can find the winXP. (this is often an automatic process for newer versions of linux)
You should now be able to reboot into either linux or winXP.
Now, since you probably are not interested in lilo telling you about the linux partition anymore, boot into linux and, as root, edit the file /etc/lilo.conf. What you want to do is to put the winXP as the default system to load (either a default line in the boot options, or a cut and paste so the windows information is above the linux information). Also, since you don’t want to bother seeing the linux parition anymore, and you want to go automatically into winXP, I would change the “timeout” line in lilo.conf to “timeout=0” or however it is done. After you have saved these changes to lilo.conf, you MUST type “lilo” for the changes to be commited to the MBR otherwise you’ll have to go through the whole process again.
6a. It is possible that all the editing of lilo described in 6 above may be done during installation depending on the version and distribution of linux being used, but step 6 should work for any distribution.
On reboot, you should now go directly into your winXP and now be able to safely delete the contents on the 10GB drive.
If anyone else wants to chime in I would greatly appreciate it. Not that I don’t trust Balduran but as you can see I already kind of screwed myself once. Thanks.
I don’t think that’s right. The MBR is not part of any partition. It can’t be, because it includes the partition table itself. Surely all Cisco has to do is make the NTFS partition active, assuming it’s bootable? You can do that with any FDISK type program. Just boot from a floppy or CD that has such a program on it.
Yeah, the more I think about it, the more it seems reasonable that there is probably some utility on the internet you can find to do this instead of all the work my suggestion would take. Also, I was assuming writing a boot record to the winXP disk wouldn’t wreck any pre-existing data because no other data would be located on those sectors.
Search the message board archives, there are a number of threads about this. Unfortunately, most of the soutions seem too entail the previous mentioned “fixmbr” which you can’t use, or the command “/fdisk mbr” which I’m not sure your win98 version of fdisk will be advanced enough to detect the winXP.
I see what you are saying, I should have said “the disk you formatted contained the boot record”. I’m assuming the boot record go hosed otherwise he would still have gone into lilo when he rebooted. Can just setting the winXP disk as active really be all there is to it? I would have thought there is no boot record on that disk.
You know, I searched this whole thread, and I didn’t find the word ‘backup’ once. I assume I’m just missing something, because no-one would really recommend messing around with your drive partitions without first backing up your system. Right?
Ok I did that and got past the DMI Pool Data part, but now I’m getting a BSOD. If I choose to start normally it says there is a problem with atapi.sys. If I start with last know good configuration I get IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL.
