Scoofy12
02-18-2004, 11:23 PM
so i dusted off my linux server today to get it set back up, and the first thing i found was that lilo didnt load. this wasnt surprising, as im fairly sure one of my drives has a problem, but not sure which. one of them (/dev/hda) is probably pushing 10 years old, and the other (/dev/hdb) was suspect when i got it, but seems to work ok (also old).
both of them have reiserFS filesytems, and i think both of them even have distros on them. i have no idea which one i was actually using, if any. probaly the one on /dev/hdb since it was bigger
anyway, after booting with the debian rescue floppy into the /dev/hda distro, i attempted to run lilo, which was setup to load either of them.
heres my error message:
Fatal: First sector of /dev/hdb1 doesn't have a valid boot signature
i used cfdisk to see if the partition table was readable (it was) and even to rewrite it but that didnt seem to have any effect. also fsck says the filesystem is ok. so, is there any program for linux that can check/repair the boot signature of a HD? and is this "boot signature" in the MBR of the disk, or in the partition, or where? any ideas so i dont have to repartition/format the drive?
both of them have reiserFS filesytems, and i think both of them even have distros on them. i have no idea which one i was actually using, if any. probaly the one on /dev/hdb since it was bigger
anyway, after booting with the debian rescue floppy into the /dev/hda distro, i attempted to run lilo, which was setup to load either of them.
heres my error message:
Fatal: First sector of /dev/hdb1 doesn't have a valid boot signature
i used cfdisk to see if the partition table was readable (it was) and even to rewrite it but that didnt seem to have any effect. also fsck says the filesystem is ok. so, is there any program for linux that can check/repair the boot signature of a HD? and is this "boot signature" in the MBR of the disk, or in the partition, or where? any ideas so i dont have to repartition/format the drive?