MY NEW DEBIAN SYSTEM!!

I'm the guy from the "Backed into a corner..." thread from a day or so ago, and I seem to have found a way out of that corner.

However, I can't use my LCD for some reason (the thing won't accept the settings I give it, though they're taken right from Samsung's website) but this 15 year old CRT sure is pretty.

I also can't boot Windows - this was supposed to be a dual boot system with XP Media Center, and I may have lost that other partition.

I'm still a long way from having a functioning system, but at least I can get on the internet from my own computer!

Any suggestions for a partition manager or repair tool? I need to fix the boot sector of a couple of partitions that were damaged (I think) by the Debian partitioner (everything worked before...).

One more question: I have a BIOS upgrade that I desparately need to do, but I only have a Windows installer for it - no boot disk possible. Think I could run it from Linux? Is there an emulator? This is dangerous stuff, I know, but I think the system's sunk without it.

BTW - it was that "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86" that finally saved me, though it didn't let me get my LCD going properly. Thanks!

Why do you say you may have lost the windows partition? Did you format or copy over some data on it, or is the partition table lost on that one?
Post the output of: fdisk -l

Edit: btw, check /boot/grub/menu.lst for the windows section at the bottom. Mine looks like:
title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

fdisk -l didn't do anything in the shell...do I need to be in something else?

here's the bottom of the menu file:
I know that XP is on the 1st real partition, though the last partition list i saw had a couple of little (a few K) partitions, but I figured those were boot things. Think I should change (hd0,1) to (hd0,0)? what's the worst that could happen?

Edit: I say that I lost it because every so often when I run some partition managment/recovery software, there are asterisks or (!) next to some partitions. Not the windows one, though. Also, I just can't seem to boot windows. Maybe I was presumptuous?

Do fdisk -l as root if it doesn't give output as user.
Grub starts counting from 0 so the first partition on the master hd is 0,0 . Change (hd0,1) to (hd0,0) and see what happens.
The asterisk means bootable, you can toggle hda1 to bootable with: cfdisk /dev/hda
Look at the bottom for the options and hit enter on bootable, then write and quit.
Reboot after changing menu.lst

AHA! We're on to something

fdisk -l didn't do anything as root either, so I tried fdisk /dev/hda/ -l and this is the result:
so what now? The windows partition is the hda2 partition (NTFS) but it says it doesn't end on a cylinder boundary -- should I change that? How should I resize it? Thanks so much for your help.

Edit: also, I see that the HPFS/NTFS one isn't bootable - how do I change that?

Sorry to say but that looks borked beyond my abilities to recover other than wipe all partitions and repartition. That would mean reinstalling everything I'm afraid.
I hope someone else knows a way to repair that, because generally you don't want partitions that don't end on a cylinder boundary, and you have somehow managed to put the last partition first.

Something like this happened to me but it was caused by bad or overheated memory and Windows would start to boot then stop suddenly.

I'm sure this is too late to help the original poster, but you can try this if you are following this thread for yourself, even though it's a long time later than the original post.

It WILL remove GRUB from your master boot record (MBR) and restore what you had before (your Windows boot sector). This may or may not work, depending on whether you were able to boot to Windows AFTER you resized the partition OR if you resized it so that Windows begins on the same spot on the hard drive as it did before. IF you resized it so that Windows starts later n othe drive than it did before (you created free space ahead of it from the Windows partition), I would not recommend doing this.

Boot your Windows XP/ME/etc. rescue disk

you don't need CDROM support, so say no to that

type fdisk /mbr at the DOS prompt, and make sure that all other hard drives that you have are unplugged before doing this in case you have other bootable drives!!!.

if all goes well, if you were able to boot after you resized the partition, or if your Windows partition still STARTS in the same place, you should be able to boot to Windows again--but not to Linux!

If you still can't boot to Windows, it's corrupted enough that you may not be able to easily recover from the disaster. Unless, of course, you did the backup you were supposed to do before making changes (that almost no one ever does). You can scrub the whole thing clean and start over or restore GRUB and have a Linux only system.

IF YOU CAN BOOT TO WINDOWS--Boot to Windows and let it repair the partition by updating the records it has of where Windows is on the disk. This happened to me and once I got that taken care of, I went back and restored GRUB and had a dual-boot. This is how I fixed a similar problem when something corrupted my Windows partition.

Next, you'll need a bootable disk with Knoppix or another live Linux CD and you'll need to read about how to restore GRUB. I can't give you directions on how to do that but it amounts to booting a live CD, opening terminal, navigating to where GRUB is located, and then running a command to restore your GRUB menu.

I forgot to add this: If you need a partition manager that handles NTFS partitions, QTparted works well enough in Linux and you have it on any Knoppix live CD. Gparted at this time doesn't resize NTFS partitions.

t2000kw - this is a 2 year old thread. I think he's fixed it one way or another by now

Thanks, but that wasn't the point (I thought I had mentioned that). My thinking was that, since the link to the thread was on a current but unrelated page, someone might have seen it, or they might stumble across it in a search. The problem was left apparently unresolved and one person more or less just said it was too bad and it looked like there was nothing else to try. I actually didn't find this thread in a search. I was on another current thread that I was involved in about a post not showing up in the forum here and the link to this thread/question was near the bottom of the page with a few other links.

I do have to admit that I was surprised that most of those links were really old ones. This one interested me since it was left unresolved for others who might search for this and not find a solution here. And it was very similar to something that I had stumbled across.

I did save my post in a document for future reference and possible posting, so the time wasn't wasted in any case.

Does this thread "bubble up" to the top of a list or something since there was a new addition to it? I thought it would only be accessible to someone doing a search for something in the post. That was my intention anyway.

The original poster could have titled it better, too. :-)