Messed up my MBR

[-=Gerrit=-]

Hi, i have tried my newly received ubuntu linux disks on my laptop...

But they really ****ed up my partitioning table or MBR table...

Before the install i was running FC3, but thought i was needing a change. After the install the system would not boot and hangs @ Grub Load, please wait....

After some ****ing around with reinstalls (also 1 of FC3) it still does not work (FC3 also hangs), now i am running this from Damn Small Linux, which odly enough DOES work... Installing did not work, because he cannot access the files and the LILOloader did not work either

I can just mount my disks and view them without ANY problem, i am messing around with the partitioning table, because one of the partitions was displayed incorrect.

Running the windows CD doesn't work, it hangs with a blank screen after saying "Preparing System or somthing like that (the first text))...

Here is my output of: fdisk -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 116280 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 50793 25599546 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 50793 116280 33005511+ f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5 ? 1234766 2964193 871631179+ 7 HPFS/NTFS


He is also whining about ignoring some data in partition table 5...

can anybody tell me how to fix my MBR? Because my system looks good (can easily access my data)...


But, I am really disapointed in UBUNTU :( the live CD looks fine (and still is able to run)

[soulestream]

well,

you can use a windows boot disk to fdisk /mbr. that will erase data in the mbr. if you are using lilo you can then boot to your damnsmalllinux disk chroot the drive and sbin/lilo that will put lilo back in your now clean MBR. if you use grub, i am not sure, because from my understanding part of grub is in mbr part is not.


soule

[phlipant]

from DSL mount your disk and enter the command

chroot /mnt/mount_point /bin/bash

This you give you a shell using your disk, you can then restore the MBR by typing

grub-install /dev/hda

assuming your boot disk is /dev/hda


P.S. you may need to mount /boot as well, some use a separate partion for /boot

[-=Gerrit=-]

Thanks for the reply, but i tried booting with a windows disk, as told that did not work (XP disks).

Reinstalling grub presented me with a lot of error messages and a non functioning boot...

But last night i tried one other thing, using the win 2k install disk to call a repair console. This worked (while XP install refused to work). From the console i called:

fixboot
fixmbr

it seemed to work :)

(only no i have no Linux at that maching :( but that will also be fixed by a new install)

[Parcival]

Yes, you still have Linux on that machine, unless you have deleted the Linux partitions, too. All you gotta do now is to reinstall and configure a new bootloader as the previous posters suggested. :)

[mudra]

I had the same problem with a recent install of MEPIS. It really borked by MBR. I tried everything, until I remebered a problem with the early versions of FC. They had a problem with the MBR and in a copy of LINUX Format magazine was a simple cure. I am not home right now, but I will try and find it and post later today.

Hope this will help.

Mudra

[-=Gerrit=-]

Originally posted by Parcival
Yes, you still have Linux on that machine, unless you have deleted the Linux partitions, too. All you gotta do now is to reinstall and configure a new bootloader as the previous posters suggested. :)

after all the reinstalling i just don't wanna look at that partition, it would be a really big mess :)

But, i was needing a reinstall, so now i am forced to, but i dont know whether to try ubuntu again....

But the sizes of the partitions just did not match, HDA5 was using more blocks then the extended partition it was in (according to FDSIK).

So now i removed the partitions of linux (in XP) bacuase FC3 was crying about a too small SWAP so, i removed all that partitions and created an empty space of 11 GB...

Now it should work...