Windows recovery console broke my boot sequence
 

Kind Sir's and Madame's

Windows recovery console broke my my boot sequence.

Quickly; I have a winXP partition on hdb2 that was installed when the drive was the primary. Since I moved that drive to slave I have never been able to boot that partition (it crashed any way so I wanted to use it for testing.)

Other partitions

hda1 windows xp ( Wife's HAS TO BOOT) ntfs
hda2 debian lenny (default boot)
hda3 extended containing rest of lenny (I think)

hdb1 windows recovery partition fat32
hdb2 the non-booting that started this. ntfs

In my attempt to get it to boot I ran the RC and did a 'bootcfg /rebuild' which is suppose to repair the windows bootloader. It failed and said to run chkdsk which I did and it made a few repairs to the no-boot. From RC I have also 'fixboot' on both win parts.

When I shut RC down to reboot the box was stuck in a reboot loop.:scratch: Now it will only boot from a cd. I have played with the boot order in the bios; no change. I have cleared the 'escd' twice; no change.

I put the hd first in the boot sequence and the system just sets there doing nothing.

What seams to have happened is that RC has somehow set something somewhere that I have been unable to clear. It causes the system to reboot only off the cd drive, (doesn't matter what bootable cd).

I have googled but have not found any posts that describe my problem. Now I know why I left windows behind. If I could only get my wonderfull wife to follow.

What should I try?

I need this box to boot both os's

Thanks

I believe that this may be a boot.ini misconfiguration. I'm not very sure right now, but I use to have (in the past) Windows in a second disk and Suse in the first one (slave and master respectively), and to make it work, I had to change the disk or rdisk number to make it boot. Those are in the boot.ini file, so I believe that if you try changing those values to the correct ones, it should boot up perfectly.

Hope that helps.

Good luck!

Thanks marco18

I knew about that. I have a partial working boot from the boot.ini in the win part on the master drive. I do have the rdisk pointed to the correct drive too.

I now know what has happened. I booted QTParted and it reports my master drive as a single partition of 300gig with fat16 file structure. Partimage reports the same size drive only with a fat12 file structure.

Some how I managed to over write the partition table and mbr which contained grub.

How do I rebuild the partition table?

Thanks

Ok I ran testdisk from the QtParted cd and was able to rebuild the partition table. And I have a successful boot. Now I need to reinstall grub to the mbr. Any pointers?

I do have a partial boot from the non-booting partition, but that is now a windows issue.

Thanks for helping me with this even though it was not the best os in the world.

See if there is any rescue option in your debian cd or dvd (suse used to have one that let you reinstall your boot manager). If you can't boot to linux that way, maybe you should consider installing Wingrub in your functional windows partition so that you can boot linux from there.
After that, reinstall grub in your mbr with your debian os. It should have some utility to do so.

Good luck!

Thanks marco18

I found the easy way. I did;
from knoppix 5.1, I just had to get it pointed at the right mount point.

I hope this helps someone else.

Thanks again