charles:
Thanks for the help. Unfortunately, I followed someone's advice on
Linuxnewbie.org last night and went into the Win2k recovery console (**I DO NOT
have the Win2k rescue floppy discs!!**), I ran the fixmbr and fixboot commands
as suggested, and it said it rewrote the mbr ok (to C:). I then restarted and
it said NTLDR not found (which I guess is the Win2k bootloader). I then booted
with a Win98 boot disk to check and see if my data was still there, and all it
had listed was *one* 9gig file (which is about about right in terms of data,
but not 9gigs in just one file!). Also, in FDISK, it is reporting my Win2000
drive as FAT12, and not FAT32! I then ran Partition Magic and it has my Win2k
drive1 listed as FAT32X with a 7.8 MB "free space" partition (?), and drive 2
(the Mandrake drive) says "critical error 110" partition table corruption (or
something like that) When I go back into Mandrake and browse my Win2k drive, it
lists about 100 small byte-sized executable files with garbled labeling for
each file (i.e. "0112tgs.exe")...So, 2 years of work and 10 gigs of data all
lost, or so it seems right now. Not to blame or diss Mandrake, but I have
installed/used extensively Redhat 5.0, 6.0, 6.1, Suse 6.2, and 6.3 (my last
distro), and this is the absolute WORST experience I have ever, ever, had with
Linux. Lilo doesn't work, My CD-Rom will not work, Mandrake has no phone
support (SuSe and Redhat do) and now 10 gigs of data GONE. It's ironic too,
because Mandrake has this "easy to use and install" perception about it, but
that was by no means my experience with this product. At any rate, I'd like to
thank the people that have helped out.
Charles A Edwards wrote:
> Lance
> No offense meant to Paul but do not follow his advise for repairing your
> MBR. It Will Not Work for Win2000. The only way to restore your MBR or any
> part of Win2000 is if you have created a Win2000 Rescue disk(not the set of
> 4 install disk, but a Rescue disk you made in Win2000). If you boot to your
> Install CD without using the Rescue disk the installer Will Not be able to
> find your existing Win2000 partition and you will not be able to do a
> restore install only a new install. This has happened to me in Win2000 so I
> have first hand knowledge of what I am saying.
> If you do not have a Rescue disk you will not be able to repair the MBR.
> If you have data in Win2000 that you need to save the only way that I can
> think of that would work is install either Win2000 or Win98 to your 2nd hd.
> and then copy the data to it.
> I had no data to lose so I did a new install of Win2000 and the first
> thing I did afterwards was create a rescue disk.
>
> Charles
>
