[ale] musical hard drives/recovery from a fried MBR

[Andrew Grimmke]

Hello List,

At the installfest last weekend I ran into a bit of a
snag and need some advice on my approach for a remedy.

I attampted to replace RedHat 7.2 on my dual boot
machine with Slackware 8.1.

The drive geometry looks like this
hda1 - 10 GB - WinME
hdb1 - 28 GB - Fat32 Storage
hdb2 - 10 GB - ext2/linux

After the installation was complete and GRUB was
replaced with Lilo on the MBR, the machine would hang
during boot (i.e. LI   ).

I attempted to reinstall Lilo by booting into DOS fdisk
/mbr (after which the box would boot straght to
Windows) then used the slack bootdisk to get into linux
and reinstalled lilo.  no dice.

Still it would hang.  We tried a number of other
things, including rewriting the partition table on hdb,
changing bootable drives in the bios, dd-ing the mbr,
reinstalling lilo, fdisking the mbr again, etc, 
Somewhere during this period Windows stopped booting at
all.  

At this point I installed RedHat 8.0, thinking that
putting Grub back on the MBR would do the trick. It
didn't.  Here is where I stand:

When it hangs during boot it says it can't find a
particular windows vxd file (I don't remember the name
of it, I can find out, but I suspect it isn't
important) right at the beginning of the boot.

If I use a windows boot disk, it tells me it does not
recognize the file system of drive C.  I can use DOS
fdisk and rewrite the partition table (without changing
the partition size), except that it gives the warning
that it will destroy the data.

If I use the Redhat Boot disk and boot into linux,
linux fdisk recognizes the partition as Fat32.  I can
mount the partition and it appears uncorrupted (from
what I can tell).

Here is what I want to do.  Install a new drive as hda.
 Install the old hda as the slave on my second ide
(hdd).

the new drive geometry
hda1 - 500 MB - ext2 Linux boot
hda2 - 10 GB - Fat32 WinME boot
hda2 - 18 GB - ext2 slackware (or something else)

linux fdisk, create partition table
dos fdisk
format c: 

boot to linux

copy the entire windows partition like so:
# dd if=/dev/hdd1 of=/dev/hda2
zero out the windows boot sector like so:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda2 bs=512 count=1

boot to windows and
A:> sys a: c: 
to copy the windows system files to the boot sector of
the Windows partition

Finally:  reinstall my favorite flavor of linux,
putting /boot and lilo on hda1.

Any suggestions, flaws?

TIA,
Andrew

Andrew Grimmke
Marietta, Georgia

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