repairing dual boot...
 

hi there,

a while ago I installed SuSE 8.0 pro onto my computer (it's a dual boot with win98SE...) ...which worked great.
But I recently had to reinstall win 98...so I lost my 'dual boot-choice' on startup,...no problem I thought, when I just used my bootdisk I could refix this.
The problem no is: this (only) boot disk doesn't seem to work anymore :-(
...and I don't have the SuSE8.0 cd's anymore (I borrowed them from someone I don't see anymore...).

So my question is: how can I re-fix my dualm boot again with only this:
the older SuSE7.0 cdrom's (and a SuSE7.0 bootdisk which still works)...but (I don't want to reinstall an older SuSE, just want my dual boot option back...)

thx in advance...
KurtB

PS: a also have working CD "knoppix 3.3"...could I use this to refix my problem (and if yes: how?)

Have you looked at tomsrtbt? It's got most of the major root commands a system needs, on one floppy disk (and is being updated all the time). Always an excellent tool to keep around (it's saved me more times than I like to think about ;) ).
In this case, it's got emacs (and vi), mount, and lilo on it, so you can boot up, mount your root linux partition/hdd, edit lilo.conf to the way you'd like it to be, run lilo, and you're fixed ^_^

A good walkthrough of this process is here

cool,
Laura

hi,
thx for the quick reply :-)

I've created that tomsrtbt-disk and got it working properly...then I followed the guidelines:

"To perform this procedure with tomsrtbt, pop in the emergency boot disk, reboot, log in as root, then remove the floppy disk. Here is a sample LILO recovery session in which the Linux root system is /dev/hda4:

# mount -t ext2 /dev/hda4 /mnt
# chroot /mnt
# /sbin/lilo
Added linux *
Added dos
# exit
# cd /
# umount mnt

my drive is partitioned this way:
hda1 = Windows partition
hda2 and hda3 = Linux & swap (I forgot which one is which...)

but when I enter the first command to begin my LILO recovery as mentioned above, I simply even can't get my hda2 (or 3) mounted...how com?
(it says something about wrong filesystem, or things he can't find in the mtab or fstab...)
-> so: what's the procedure to fix it...(and meanwhile don't lose my windows partition aswell :-s )

Well, an easy reason may be that if you're following those directions verbatim and your partition isn't ext2, it will kick out like that.

Do you remember if you formatted it with ext3, ReiserFS, etc? ext3 (which is just ext2 but with journaling) tends to be a bit of a default for new installations.

-Laura

nope... :-(

I both tried to mount a ext3 or ReiserFS fs...but it still doesn't mount.
btw: I still get the message: "wrong fs, bad superblock, or to many filesystems mounted"...what does this mean or has it something to do with this?

I'm wondering if you got a private reply to this as I'm having a similar problem.

Michael

No, sorry...

I didn't get any private msg on this one,...so I'm still stuck with a working OS I can't boot .

I'm afraid I'll have to get my hands on some working cd's again and reinstall it from scratch :(

grtz,
KurtB