Hi,
I'm having a problem that appears to be the inverse of what
some people here have had before. The partition tables on BOTH my
disks, as linux sees them, are screwed up. However, if you boot dos or
windows 95 from the hard disks (via lilo, which still works), both dos
and w95 still have an accurate idea of the partition information and
work fine. I guess they're using a copy of the partition table as
opposed to the real thing.
So: Is there some way I can get DOS to write its idea of the
partition info back out to the main partition table? (in the boot sector?)
Just in case anyone is contemplating this setup -- I strongly
suspect that using any_d.b in conjunction with windows 95 is what got
me into this mess. I have dos, and a couple of linux filesystems on my
first drive, and w95 plus the rest of my linux filesystems on my
second drive. I use any_d.b to boot windoze 95. W95 was originally
installed by making the second drive the primary, installing it, and
then switching it back to being the secondary. It seems to run just
fine, but I suspect that it's somehow now completely happy. I found
the partition tables on both my disks trashed after installing a bunch
of software in w95.
Note that if you boot dos from a floppy, it sees the same
trashed partition info as linux does. If you try to boot linux, the
kernel loads, and then gets very unhappy when it tries to mount the
root filesystem. (Issues lots of invalid seeks and such.) Am I correct
in suspecting fidsk /mbr will NOT cure my problem? (I worry that it
will copy the bad partition table over the good one...) Unfortunately,
the dos fdisk doesn't show me the partion info in enough detail for me
to just be able to use this info to reconstruct the linux one.
If anyone had any ideas how to cure this, I'd really appreciate
hearing from you. I have a whole bunch of data I'd really rather not
lose.
Many thanks,
-Arup Mukherjee ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
