[ale] Can no longer boot one of my drives

[Evan Pitstick]

For diagnostic purposes I would start by taking a look at the partition
table and then trying to mount disk 2 partitions in fedora. If that
works try downloading and burning the super GRUB disk. If you can use it
to boot suse then you can narrow it down to your boot loader. If you
know its the boot loader then you can always reinstall the boot loader
in on of the OS's that is coming up. Many times in my experience a drive
not booting is one of the first signs that it is going dead. If you can
mount it I would copy any valuable data to drive 1 first thing. If you
cant mount it and you have valuable information you could try dd_rescue.
This is an excellent set or scripts using dd to recover info. Maybe the
best place to start after thinking about it and writing all of this
might be to use any diag software from the HD manufacture. That would
probably be a job for Vista. Anyways that would be a good place to
start. If you get somewhere with it lets us know what happened.... maybe
we can help some more. 

On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 09:38 -0500, Trey Sizemore wrote:
> Hi all-
> 
> I'm hoping someone can help with the issue I'm having.  Here's a quick
> rundown of the situation:
> 
> Desktop machine with 2 500GB SATA drives.  One drive has both Windows
> VISTA (1st partition) and Fedora 7 (sda2 is / and sda3 is /home)
> 
> Second drive only has only openSUSE 10.3 (sdb1 is /, sdb2 is swap, sdb3
> is /tmp and the rest is an LVM with HOME, OPT, USR, and VAR)
> 
> I use GAG (boot loader) to boot and have entries for all 3 operating
> systems.  I have been using this setup successfully for quite a while
> now.
> 
> I was most recently in openSUSE and shut down the machine Monday morning
> to go out of town.  When I came back last night, I could boot into
> either Vista or Fedora, but not openSUSE.  Trying to do so gives the
> error: "Sector boot not found or invalid".  
> 
> I went into the "add an OS" setup to look at how the drives were being
> seen.  It looks like:
> Drive 1
> A Boot from floppy
> B 07h NTFS/Windows
> C 83h Linux EXT2
> D 83h Linux EXT2
> 
> Drive2
> A Boot from floppy
> B 76h
> 
> That's it for Drive2.
> 
> I suppose it could be a bad drive, but I've not seen anything with the
> drive prior to this to suggest that.  The cabling looks good between the
> drive and motherboard.  Any ideas here as to how to go about
> troubleshooting and hopefully getting this drive back?
> 
> Let me know if any more info is required, and thanks for any and all
> help!
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part