Hey Guys,

I run a local RedHat server that I use for web development. One day while developing, all the sudden my Samba network drive disconnected, SSH quit working, and Webmin would no longer load up. So, I rebooted, only to be brought to a grub command prompt.

I loaded Knoppix off a CD and found out that, on my hard drive, my /boot folder is empty, and so is my /etc folder ... I'm not sure what happened, or if anything else is missing, but how hard is this to fix? How would I go about fixing this? Or would it be easier to format/reinstall (although I would rather not do this if at all possible).

Also, any ideas on why this happened?

Thanks for your input,
Andrew

Three possible reasons:
1. Malicious cracker ruined it,
2. Hard disk needs replacement,
3. Sudden power failure had fatal results (this is unlikely)

In addition to emerson's statement #2 it would be
good to know what kind of file-system layout you
had originally, whether all partitions to all mount-
points were on the same physical device, for instance.


Cheers,
Tink

Hmm, I don't know much about linux, but I have all my partitions on one hard drive and when I installed redhat, I had the hard drive automatically partitioned in the setup.

You didn't at any time plug in a hard drive from another distro (as secondary drive) which alo had its own /boot sector did you? Modern Redhat versions detect the double /boot and decide not to mount them. This is usually temporary... once you disconnect the secondary drive, the first one from then on boots as normal. The redhat rescue CD should have restore options for boot sector recovery... you should be albe to recover a destroyed GRUB from there.

Hmm, how do I run a boot sector recovery w/ the rescue CD?

I thought I knew ... I booted off my RedHat CD and at the prompt I typed 'linux rescue' and then proceeded from there only to get a prompt that said "You do not have any linux partitions" and it brings me to a shell prompt where I can't do much of anything.

This doesn't make much sense to me since my data is still in-tact ... I can retrieve it in knoppix. Why can't it see I had linux installed?

Thanks for any input.
Andrew

Usually the procedure goes something like...

Boot from the CD into rescue mode (push ENTER at prompt)
OK through any Language settings etc.
The Rescue should detect your Linux install and mount it it /mnt/sysimage/
Make the detected install at /mnt/sysimage into the focused system by typing...
chroot /mnt/sysimage/
Once that's active, reinstall GRUB for your system with the command...
grub-install /dev/hda

It's odd that you can't see the Linux pratitions though. I would at this point use somethign like parted (which comes on System Rescue CD - http://www.sysresccd.org/ ) to see whether the partitions are screwed. You can likely do this or similar under Knoppix as well.

According to this description the boot sector is functional.

Edit: Why don't you run file system utilities like e2fsck, this my show useful error messages.