So my computer decided to die on me and the result was that I had to buy a new Motherboard and CPU. I decided to go with an Intel 865PE chipset and 2.4C Pentium4, because I was tired of reliability issues with my AMD XP set up.

However, I was surprised to find neither my Windows XP nor my Red Hat 8.0 installs would boot after the change. I was able to recover XP with a recovery install, but I'm still lost as to what to do to save my Red Hat. I can't do a new install because I will lose all the data I had on there. I tried doing an upgrade install but that appeared to only upgrade some packages, and I believe the kernal needs updating. I also tried recovery mode, but I dont really know where to begin fixing the kernals, and I didnt see any commands that would really help me out.

I dont really know where to start, so if anyone could help me out that would be wonderful. The only thing I'm really concerned about is saving the data in my /home directory, however I'm not exactly sure how i can save that information to a CDRW from Recovery mode. If you can inform me of a way to get Red Hat booting, even it it screws up all my previously installed packages and such, that would be great. Thanks.

probably you need to rewrite your boot code
try booting from recovery CD and erinstall your boot loader

Did you try to boot from your Red Hat boot floppy? (you did make one, right?)

To save /home, another thing I would try to do is use Knoppix. If you aren't familiar, it is a Linux distro which boots and runs off of a CD. It if often used to rescue data from Linux and windows drives. Take a look here http://www.knoppix.net/docs/index.php/FaqRescue or here
http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/knoppix/ .

Good luck

Hey,

you will be able to recover all of your data from the Linux drive if you can get into Windoze.

A while ago I downloaded the demo of ext2fs (http://kb.paragon.ag/paragon/templ/169.jsp?catId=3118) . It allows you to read a ext2 drive and copy it to a windows one.

I don't imagine it will have changed much since I used it.


Hamish

Yes I created a boot floppy when I first installed Red Hat, however my floppy drive seems to have died since then, since it will never accept the disk; and whenever I try to make a new one it says there is a problem, no matter which floppy I put in, even brand new ones. So I'm assuming its the drive. And my roommates think floppies are dumb and refuse to install them on their computers, so I'm SOL and can't do a boot from floppy.

I will try re-installing the boot loader, and see what happens. Thanks.

PS. Has anyone had problems viewing the forums with Mozilla Firebird? Last night I had no problems, but today I completely cant see the forums, everythign is cut off from the add banner down. I really have no clue what is causing this, but until then I have to use regular Mozilla and/or explorer to utilize the forums.

Um okay I have a question. I dont understand why reinstalling the boot-loader will do anything. Grub starts up fine, and I can choose XP and Linux. When i choose XP it starts up fine, but linux just won't boot. So wouldnt that be a kernel problem, not the boot loader?

It ended up being the kernal.

I recompilied the kernel in rescue mode, and that fixed the problem.