Tim Wood wrote:
This is where old habits got me. I have in the past had success in using
a floppy boot of Win98 and Partition Magic 4.0. I thought I would add
more space for Deb - there was free space from the dump of RH.
oops. lilo normally stores the absolute location on the disk of the
kernel it's going to boot -- so when you move a partition, you have to
re-run lilo or, as in your case, make another boot floppy.
I never use boot floppies, but this is what I normally do to recover a
system that's become unbootable:
1. boot from the install CD or from a bootable business card (wonderful
product, but a little out of date now)
2. mount the drive, say in /mnt/botched
3. chdir to /mnt/botched and run "chroot .". at this point, you
basically have your system running, just with the kernel from the CD
instead of the kernel on the disk. you can pretty much do anything you
normally could.
I'd run lilo at this point and everything would be hunky-dory.
presumably you'd create a boot floppy here, but I'm not sure how to do that.
you said you were also having trouble with modules; normally to fix
modules.dep, one runs depmod. try running that once you're within the
chroot and see if it does the right thing. don't forget to exit from the
chroot and unmount the drive before you reboot.
at worst, none of this should destroy your data. if you can get the
drive mounted, I believe netscape stores all its data in ~/.netscape,
and you can just tar-gzip that up (except ~/.netscape/cache, of course,
which you should probably delete or move out of the way).
