Pooched MBR trying to turn DMA on
I'm running Debian (kernel 2.4.21) on a Dell Optiplex GX Pro and know just enough to be very dangerous. :(
The disk seemed a bit sluggish, so after a little research, I tried turning on DMA on the boot drive with: hdparm -d1 /dev/hda Things were OK immediately afterwards. hdparm -Tt showed a 50% improvement. I made happy noises. Shutdown and now won't boot. After BIOS messages, it sits at a text-mode GRUB message (not a prompt - system is unresponsive; not the GRUB menu - just the words GRUB). This system won't boot from floppy or CD, so I'm hosed. Hoping to recover all the filesystems on the disk. I was thinking I would pop the drive into another machine running the same distro and try doing a grub-install. Good idea? If not, any other suggestions? Will the drive "remember" it's set to DMA? Thanks in advance for any advice! john |
"Will the drive "remember" it's set to DMA? "
No. Rebooting will clear that. "Hoping to recover all the filesystems on the disk. I was thinking I would pop the drive into another machine running the same distro and try doing a grub-install. Good idea? If not, any other suggestions?" It is easier to use a rescue CD. Boot a rescue CD. If it is knoppix then umount your / partition after you boot. Other rescue CDs don't have to be umount the / partition. Assuming that your / partition is /dev/hda3 and the file system type is ext3 then do: umount /dev/hda3 fsck -t ext3 /dev/hda3 Answer y to everything that fsck asks. mkdir /horse mount -t ext3 /dev/hda3 /horse chroot /horse grub-install /dev/hda shutdown -r now ----------------------------- Steve Stites |
Follow up
Jailbait - thanks for the suggestions.
Multiple problems compounded the original one. I spent the last couple days rebuilding the system. Just wanted to let you know I appreciated the help. |
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