Can I Recover /boot partition?

Warrioruw · 11-13-2004, 06:17 PM

Hi,

I have Redhat 9. Few days ago, I accidently deleted /boot partition from dual OS WinXP. I tried linux rescue, no luck, since it only did /mnt/sysimage.
So all I got after reboot is the GRUB command line interface.

Is there a way to reinstall the lost data on /boot partition, without wiping out other linux partition?

Here is the original harddisk partition:

primary bootable HPFS - NTFS
primary Linux Ext3 [/boot]
primary Linux Ext3 [/]
logical Linux swap2

please help!

Samsara · 11-13-2004, 09:24 PM

I assume that your /boot partition is properly formatted (i.e. ext2/ext3)

Boot a knoppix bootdisk, mount your partitions in the way you usually would, e.g.

Code:

# assuming you have only a root partition and boot partition
# mount root (/) partition
mount /dev/hdxy /mnt/hdxy
# mount boot partition in proper place:
mount /dev/hduv /mnt/hdxy/boot
chroot /mnt/hdxy
# find out what the kernel rpm is called
rpm -q kernel
rpm --reinstall kernel-foo.rpm
# (something like the above)

Repeat last two lines for the grub package. I think that's all that resides in /boot, so after doing a grub install from the grub shell (unless grub is still installed and properly set up), everything should be back to normal (sign out, unmount, take knoppix out and reboot).

HTH,

Samsara

Warrioruw · 11-14-2004, 01:18 AM

The lost /boot partition is shown "unallocated", so I presume it is not formatted. How to format it? Is that ok to have bootable CD instead of floppy disk? (I don't have floppy drive)

Samsara · 11-14-2004, 10:09 AM

Use qtparted to create, e.g. an ext2 filesystem in that partition.

Regards,

Samsara

villusion · 08-10-2005, 12:58 AM

Ok, what if I accidentally created a swap out of my my hda2 drive..How do I get it back???

I tried using r-linux, but it created a bunch of $Inode files on my winodws system, how do I convert that back?

Sample Files

-David
villusion@new.rr.com