> 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
> >
