I have a HP laptop with vista business 64 which (Vista) fell over last month. It's there, but won't boot after some stupid twat wiped the partition table, which upset grub, and had to resort to testdisk. Anyhow it means I have fix my box. I have a download which seems to require windows. I registered and got a windows downloader :-((. The @$£! thing writes a zero length file under wine.



Any one with the inside track on this compile error from ntfsprogs?

make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/dec/download/src/ntfsprogs/1.9.0/ntfsprogs-1.9.0/include'
Making all in libntfs
make[2]: Entering directory `/home/dec/download/src/ntfsprogs/1.9.0/ntfsprogs-1.9.0/libntfs'
.deps/attrib.Plo:1: *** multiple target patterns. Stop.
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/dec/download/src/ntfsprogs/1.9.0/ntfsprogs-1.9.0/libntfs'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/dec/download/src/ntfsprogs/1.9.0/ntfsprogs-1.9.0'
make: *** [all] Error 2

the file libntfs/.deps/attrib.Plo (whassat?) looks like this from line 1

attrib.lo attrib.o: attrib.c ../config.h h:/mingw/3.3.1/include/stdio.h \
h:/mingw/3.3.1/include/_mingw.h h:/mingw/3.3.1/include/stddef.h \
h:/mingw/3.3.1/lib/gcc-lib/mingw32/3.3.1/include/stddef.h \
h:/mingw/3.3.1/mingw32/include/winx/stddefx.h \
etc. I don't have a drive h:, btw. Google turns up nothing. nada. absolute zero.

Can't use a live CD with ntfsprogs already available? It's also unclear exactly what you're trying to do at this point; could you clarify?

Through negligence and accidents I have lost
1. My windows partition - occasionally used for odd things
2. My recovery partition which is supposed to rescue me out of this situation.

I can forget them and overwrite, but I'd like to have the occasional use of windows - e.g. to turn on wifi after some dweeb turns it off, because linux doesn't seem to manage it. So I can't access my ntfs and am trying to save my a**

EDIT: The partitions are both have problems at the beginning - the low mileage windows partition had grub upset it, and the rescue partition because it had some previous accident and won't boot, although it mounted until recently. I don't know if an extended partition will ever boot windows. fsck.ntfs is not yet out there, is it?

Well, I asked because if you're trying to save data, then a rescue disk, possibly with testdisk, comes to mind, and I wasn't sure why you'd add the complication of building the tools. If you don't care about that, then a reinstall might be best. If you have no Windows install media because you were relying on the recovery partition, then... Oi.

If you have another Windows machine, you might have luck explanting the drive from your laptop and mounting it as an external drive and using Windows repair tools on it.

That's exactly my situation. It's a 2.5" drive from a laptop.
Data isn't an issue. The system is low mileage. and the only data on it is the Garmin maps, which can be reinstalled. But I found I have a backup, if I can restore it. I have a 500 GB drive with ext3, ntfs, & vfat partitions, and there is some class of a backup I had completely forgotten about.
It seems like it's less than a year old (which is very new by my standards) and hell, nothing much ever changes there because it's so rarely accessed. As I'm only able to boot linux, am I still stuck in Catch-22, or is there a clever way out of this? Before I try it, I'll organise a proper backup of wanted linux partitions. I have luser access to windows boxes in College, but I don't think I'll have permission to do anything fancy. I can mount a usb drive - that's about it.

I think mostlyharmless has the answer already. Why not use a live cd/dvd/usb or gpxe to aome networked OS?

What about using ultimate boot cd? http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Even making a bartsPE on a different OS may help.

I have the UBCD and can get no good of it whatsoever. What would you suggest I do with it?

I assume that /mnt/dvd in your example isn't a bootable DVD, as it's 27G, but actually a partition on your disk.

Make a backup of the whole drive with dd or the like, if you can, not just your Linux partitions, before you do anything else.

What you need, but unfortunately didn't make when you made the WindowsImageBackup, was a bootable System Rescue disk. Or did you? If you did, boot with it, point it at the ImageBackup and you're done. But you didn't, and forgot about it and left it in the closet, right?

However, you might have luck downloading this:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/e...DisplayLang=en
on one of the school's Windows computers and burning a DVD with the image. Looks like it can read WindowsImageBackup files and restore "bare metal". I haven't tried it.

Another thing you can try is running VirtualBox or VMWare to access the data. If you look at this:

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/win...e-in-vista/602

You'll see that the WindowsImageBackup directory has a VHD file, which the author accesses from Virtual PC 2007. You can't run Virtual PC 2007 under Wine, unfortunately, (I've tried) but VHD files should be readable by Vbox. It might even boot the thing, which would make life very easy, as you'd have a running version (in a VM) of the backup image. I haven't tried that yet.

Alternatively, you could try downloading an evaluation copy of Windows 7 (freely available) and see if it wants to restore the Vista image. It might work. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd353205

Finally, I don't know how "fancy" it would be, but you can buy a docking station relatively cheap (Aluratek USB SATA HDD Docking Enclosure, compatible with Linux) which will mount your laptop drive as an external drive like a thumb drive on the school computers. Whether or not you have privileges to run utilities on external drives is another matter. I suppose you can ask a Windows using friend to use their machine to repair your disk. I've done this in a situation very similar to yours. You can also use the thing as a way of making rotating bare metal backup drives for remote storage.

I'm confused (that's nothing new ) and might be barking up the wrong tree, but if you're trying and failing to build ntfsprogs with mingw, why not try this ready-made lot instead?
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/ntfsprogs.htm

@BrianL: Thanks - it has that file in the middle of it and references it. I don't have minigw and hadn;t a breeze what was up, but it doesn't matter because I found I had mount.ntfs-3g already installed! They just never linked it into mount, so I have to know it's there.

@mostlyharmless: /mnt/dvd was me mounting my usb drive's ntfs partition which has the windows backup windows backup and listing it's contents.27G was space used, not available. Thank you for those excellent links which give me some things to try. I'm closing this thread, because I certainly won't try harder than that. I'll post on certain success or failure if I get it.

Ok, I know I said I'm closing this thread, but I ended up with such a good idea I had to put it here to save some other dweeb having to think it through. I have a sata laptop hd to be fixed. But I also have a usb drive which _is_ sata, so all I need is a windows box with Administrator and I can sort it - hopefully.

EDIT: Going down in flames because only testdisk can read the ntfs - the partitions are destroyed. To qoute Podge & Rodge (2 foul mouthed local tv puppet comedians) "Less of a ***** I could give!"

Now I'm back with an update.
Everything I want to use in the next 3 months is 'garbage' in wine's appdb, so I set about reviving the windows. I'm stuck with a grub stage2read Error

Having posted on www.windowsquestions.org [here:-P ] I went to www.vistax64.com and was linked to
http://neosmart.net/downloads/miscel...20Disc.torrent

Which grabs the files it needs from the installed windows. After a few attempts, it's telling me "Everything's OK, this should boot" I still have a stage2read Error :-((, although linux boots fine.

So I reinstalled grub. Grub is happy. Compared my menu.lst syntax to (known working)backup, and yes, it's good. STILL stage2read Error on /dev/sda1. 'Invalid device' on the other NTFS drives (=What are you talking about?)

My next and last option is to tell m$ vista to restore a backup, before which I will have to back up. If I try that I face the appalling prospect of having to tell windows to do it's worst, & get stuck in with ntfsresize, fdisk, etc. to try and get back linux, or a reinstall, configure painfully, & data rescue.

Any ideas?? What's a good OSS backup tool? I've simply been using cp -a but I don't hugely need compression except for speed.

According to the grub wiki, stage 1 reports a "read error" when stage 2 is loaded if there's a disk read error. So, maybe a hardware defect/new bad block. Can you run Window's chkdsk from that Win 7 repair disk?

I use rsync for my Linux backup, Acronis for Windows backup.

Went the long road, backed up linux, restored windows from a backup using that rescue cd, and it restored my partition table, which upended every distro and left my boot partition with a 20G filesystem on an 84Mb partition :-/. But that's what backups are for, isn't it?

A little experiment showed me that 'cp -auf' works as a backup tool, but the real issue is not that, but how to get rid of files already backed up but deleted in the original because they are b.s., stale kernels or tired jokes.

This leaves me with the best of all worlds. I haven't touched the mS backup, but I can install trial versions of (expensive) software, and restore the backup when they run out :-D. I just have to remember to turn off all the crap loaded with vista - All fancy graphics (shades of kde!) and User Account Control, which is malware that pops up every 20 seconds and says "You have to be administrator to do this; Is that OK?" 'Yes I am the @%$£! administrator, shut up and do it.' I should really disable the internet also while I'm at it.