Fwd: Re: [SlugBug] partitions and partitioning and some swearing

[Peter Collier]

On Tuesday 10 August 2004 01:07, Alan Dawson wrote:
> meant for list oops
>
> ----- Forwarded message from Alan Dawson <aland at burngreave.net> -----
>     Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2004 01:03:50 +0100
>     From: Alan Dawson <aland at burngreave.net>
> Reply-To: Alan Dawson <aland at burngreave.net>
>  Subject: Re: [SlugBug] partitions and partitioning and some swearing
>       To: m.dewar at sheffield.ac.uk
>
> Quoting Mike Dewar <m.dewar at sheffield.ac.uk>:
> > Now we have a partition table that has hda1 to hda8 where hda1 is the win
> > partition, hda2 is extended, hda 3 and 4 are little FAT32 partitions,
> > hda4-hda8 are linux-y things like root, swap and god knows what.
>
> Firstly ..  does anything boot still ?
>
> Secondly .. if it does whats the problem?
>
> thirdly.. what does fdisk -l  and mount say
>
> AED

	I had this same problem with a friend yesterday, with win2000 and suse9.1. 
There is a solution on SuSE's site. I can't remember the exact location on 
their site, download the file parted.img.gz. Open it with gunzip -c 
parted.img.gz > /dev/fd0 (There is a readme in the same directory). 
The instructions said to boot up with the installation cd, when the options 
for types of install come on the screen press F6, choose installation and 
type fixpart=1 in the options box. According to the instructions there is 
supposed to be the option of which hard disk has the boot record but this did 
not come up for us. 
	Tried several times, it said that the file had been run/installed but no hard 
disk options. On rebooting the problem was not cured. We did cure it 
partially by starting to reinstall win2000, delete drive C: and rebooting 
with a win98 floppy. In dos mode prior to installing win98, typed fdisk /mbr. 
Fdisk itself kept crashing the computer but it was ok with fdisk /mbr.
Then we reinstalled win2000 in full, which now boots up ok and for the moment 
use the suse installation cd to use the option to boot up installed system to 
boot up suse.
	On the fedora site I've seen this but not tried it yet. 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-May/msg00908.html

Hope the above is of help, re the suse solution, I only tried the floppy image 
not the cdrom iso one, perhaps that would have worked, or it was a machine 
specific hardware issue.

Peter C