on 8/6/00 12:34 AM, Mark Weaver wrote:
> I'm afraid I've got something extremely stupid to confess. I was monkeying
> around this evening resizing some partitions. I made the Windows partition
> smaller, which freed up about 3.5GB, which I turned around and turned into a
> part of Linux's file system as /home. Well, it's a little late in the day
> and it slips my mind to that if I don't format the partition it won't work,
> and if I do then...well...I'm not sure what I was thinking. At any rate, now
> when I attempt to boot my Linux system I get kernel panic. The message I get
> is that it can't mount (root) fs.
>
> Am I correct in assuming that I've toasted my file system, or is there
> something I can do to correct this HUMUNGOUSly STUPID error in judgement.
> This ranks right up there with one of the DUMBEST things I've EVER done. I
> didn't have any "can't do without" data there yet, but everyone's mail and
> stuff is there. O, just for the record this is a home machine. Still, I'm
> feeling REAL dumb so if you want to flame me...well, I guess I've got it
> coming. This was a real dumb move and I should have known better than to do
> something like this. I DO know better...I just don't know what came over
> me!...honest!!
>
> What should I do?
>
> Mark
you may be able to fix it I think. you moved the partions around so when it
tried to find the place on the disk where / is supposed to be it's not there
any more - you have to tell it where it moved to. can you boot with a
rescue floppy? if you don't have one there are ways to make them in windows.
it may be as simple as booting with a resuce floppy and running lilo.
you may have to edit lilo.conf and put in a line that tells it about the
physical details of the drive - cyllendars, blocks, whatever.
I'm not sure about the details of doing this but maybe that will give you
some place to start.
if you can't get that to work you may be able to mount your linux partitions
in windows and get your data out before you reinstall.
there will be specific instructions for this stuff in the how to's on line
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX/howtos.html
good luck
Gavin
