Re: RH 5.2 Crash, please help?

[Aaron Prohaska <verdesoft verdesoft net>]

I think what you are saying about win98 wanting to take the whole drive
is precicely the problem. Windows tells me that there is 6.2gigs on the
drive when it should only be seeing 3.1 which is what I partitioned it
to be. Anyway, it sounds like I am going to have to re-install. Most of
the solutions you gave me I don't know how to do sinc I am so new with
Linux. The one that I think I would be able to figure out is booting
from a kernel floppy, except I don't have one. I'll have to make sure
and make one for my next system.

Thanks for the help I really appreciate it.

Aaron

Ramon Gandia wrote:
> 
> Aaron Prohaska wrote:
> >
> > I have posted this message a couple of times without getting any
> > response. Does anyone know of a solution to this problem or do I have to
> > re-install everything. I would really appreciate some help.
> >
> > Yesterday I was working in win98 (this is a dual boot system) and I
> > happen to crash it. No big suprise since it happens often in win. So win
> > locked up and all I could do was turn the system off and then back on.
> > Only when I turned it back on I just got Lil at the command prompt and
> > couldn't boot anything. At this point I was still not too concerned and
> > just broke out my boot disk thinking all would be well. Figuring I could
> > just go and re-install Lilo. Except then when I tried to boot from the
> > disk I get this error:
> >
> > Partition Check:
> > hda : hda1 hda2 < hda5 hda6 hda7 hda8
> > [MS-DOS Fs Rel. 12,Fat 12,Check=n,conv=6,uid=0,gid=0,umask=022]
> > [me=0xe2,cs=3363,#f=204,fs=24914,fl=38037,ds=51214,de=8702,data=51784,se=20259,ts=472725201,ls=29194,rc=0,fc=4294967295]
> > Transaction block size=512
> > Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:05
> >
> > I don't know what all the char=somenumber means, but I know the kernel
> > panic at the end is bad news. I am sort of hoping not to have to
> > re-install everything.
> 
> What this looks to me is that your Win98, in the process of
> crashing, wrote some data to the Linux portion of your hard
> drive.  This has been reported here a few times in the last
> several months.   Apparently it was rare or non-existent under
> Windows 95.
> 
> I can conceive of several things that you could do, although I
> do not hold much hope.
> 
> 1. Boot from a kernel floppy.  You probably do not have one.
> This is a floppy containing the kernel; you normally would
> create it from your running Linux system by dd'ing the compressed
> kernel to a floppy.  Normally this would boot.  What it does
> is boot the kernel from the floppy, bypassing the LILO or
> other loaders.
> 
> 2. Boot the RedHat 5.2 installation floppy and CD, and when
> you get to the part about fdisking the hard drive, go to an
> alternate VC and mount your Linux partitons and look around.
> 
> 3. It seems as if what Win98 did was to rewrite or overwrite
> the partition tables and/or portions of the tables.  The data
> may or may not be intact.  If the partition table has been
> overwritten or modified, it is possible that the partitions are
> not mountable under Linux under steps 1, 2 above.  In that case,
> assuming you kept notes on how you originally partitioned your
> disk, you could run Linux FDISK on it and reparttion exactly
> the same way.  Set your partition types to Linux.  The end
> result may be a mountable partition if your other portions
> of the partition (directory, inode tables etc) did not get
> hosed.
> 
> I have never considered running Linux and Windows on the same
> drive as a very safe thing to do.  Windows is getting increasingly
> aggressive about using the whole drive.  You always need to
> take care that some Windows operation is not going to run
> rampant.... for instance, it was widely reported that in Win98
> installation, if you choose VFAT32, it uses the whole drive
> and erases your Linux stuff.  You can work around this, but
> its not the default in some cases.  The problem is not so much
> in Microsoft's, but in the way that the OEM set up his
> Win98 boot floppy and its associated SETUP.EXE program.  With
> Windows 95 apparently this take-the-whole-drive-over option did
> not exist.
> 
> Good luck.
> 
> --
> Ramon Gandia ================= Sysadmin ================ Nook Net
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