I was installing Fedora 11 from DVD to a machine with two SATA drives which has (or at least did have...) a dual boot installation of Windows XP. The second drive has a copy of the first drives installation of Windows XP. Fedora was installed on only the first drive. In the final portion of the install, I inadvertently overwrote the /boot partition on the Linux install while trying to back up the XP partition using dd to the second drive.

So, the question is how do I recover/reinstall the /boot partition data?

I haven't turned the machine off or rebooted it yet.

I'd really not like to reinstall Fedora again. What program/script populates the /boot partition?

Lloyd

I assume you have a separate boot partition and want to use the Fedora bootloader to boot?? You can use the installation CD to install Grub bootloader files. If you want specific instructions on your computer, it would be best if you loaded the Fedora CD, opened a terminal/konsole and as root user, run command fdisk -l and post that partition information here. If you have a separate /boot partition, you will need the Grub files and the kernel placed there.

Your assumption is correct. Here is the output from fdisk -l:

Disk /dev/sda: 400.0 GB, 400088457216 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 48641 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xa0da4ea0

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 1111 8924076 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2 1112 30401 235271925 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 * 30402 30427 204800 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 30428 48641 146303955 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 30428 48641 146302976 8e Linux LVM

Disk /dev/sdb: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x1549f232

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 1111 8924076 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sdb2 * 1112 30401 235271925 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/dm-0: 147.8 GB, 147832438784 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 17972 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/dm-0 doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/dm-1: 1979 MB, 1979711488 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 240 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/dm-1 doesn't contain a valid partition table

sda3 contains the munged /boot partition. From looking at it in Gparted, it looks like I need to first unmount and format it before I can do anything else. I assume that the format type would be ext3, that correct?

I can get a kernel from another Fedora 11 machine I have,


Further coaching would be helpful.


Thanks.
Lloyd

I don't use Fedora or LVM and have never used a separate boot partition. I had a link explaining how to bookmarked but it's dead. Probably googling Grub boot partition will give you some info. You'll need the files you generall have in the /boot directory in your boot partition to start with. Good Luck.