so i booted up XP today and it worked fine, had to do some web design, shutdwon for the day and i come home and boot back up - and i get an error mesasge sayign Error loading operating system....so i use the repair console and tyr to fix the bootsector...well i think this is what messed me up because now i cant view my hdd...anyone have any system recovery tools that i can burn to a cd and bootup w/ so i can get my systme back up and running






i know this has ntohing to do w/ linux but im desperate...i cant afford to lose my data

http://www.knoppix.org/

It has support for most filesystems and tools like
dd_rescue and lde.

..and gpart, of course.

and i can burn this to a cd and boot up w/ it?

b/c i already looked at knoppix but it came off to me as a tool only for linux file systems

i need something quick to downoad - something i can just burn, boot up, fix my drive and get back in XP

What about booting in failsafe mode? At least you can browse your HD and recover/copy your files...

you can boot to knoppix; it supports (and autodetects) most of the modern hardware. It doesn't install anything to the HD, but but runs directly from the CD instead.

ok so i take it noboyd knows about a small 2mb program that will boot from cd and fix my drive

Sorry to be rude, but would you shut up and listen?

No, there's no magical 2MB tool you can download and boot. Knoppix is the best prescription -- it will allow you to get at all the data, if it's still there. What you're able to from there, you're on your own. Another option would be to boot from a windows cd and do a restore from there... You do have a legal copy of windows, don't you?

--Shade

To repeat what Shade said in other words:
The reason why there is no 2mb tool to fix your system,
is because it is not evident what is wrong with your system.

In case your whole system is corrupted eg. by having 2kb holes in every 20MB, you have to examine your filesystem manually to find out some directory nodes and files, this case the best tool is probably lde.

If your partition table is lost, but all the data is there, what you need is some way to figure out where your partitions might be. gpart can help guessing the layout of partitions . But to construct the partition table correctly, you probably need sfdisk to fine-tune the output.

If your partitions are laid somewhat strangely, you probably have to use loopback devices and losetup to mount partitions without any partition table (giving disk offset explicitly).

If just your master boot record is lost, what you need, is a tool named mbr/install-mbr to create new one.

You you value your data, you probably want to make backup of the corrupted system before trying anything else. dd_rescue (combined with network support and other machine having enough space or a cd/dvd burner) is for you.

All of this is included in knoppix (and lots of more).

Hi,

There's also RIP (Recovery Is Possible): http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-r...looplinux/rip/

Oliv'

If your main partition is FAT32, try a Win98Boot Disk (you can get it here: http://ephemeral-designs.com/downloads/boot98se.exe). Download, run the file, boot from disk.

If it is your MBR you suspect, try format /mbr -- this will reset your MBR.

But it will not see his Linux partitions, it must be a Linux tool imho...

He did not specify where his data was, only what OS he used to access it