W2K Pro/Mandrake -Big Problems

[willy1]

My main home box with my 'life' on it has been a dual boot machine that's been solid for quite a while.

I rebooted last night from a working W2K machine, and ... nothing.

I don't get the Mandrake boot loader OS selection screen, the box can't boot from disk. CMOS sees the disk.

It appears that the partition table has been trashed somehow. Booting from CD into Mandrake and using the 'rescue' function to try to reload the boot loader fails.
Similarly the W2K setup doesn't like the disk either.

I haven't comitted to formatting the disk yet - I'm pretty stubborn about these things, and like to try everything possible first.

Does anyone know a good bootable partition utility that I can use to inspect the HD, and possibly repair a boot sector? If nothing else, I would like to know if there is a readable NTFS volume, then I could install an OS on another drive and recover my stuff.

I know - backups are good.... but somehow it never seems to hapen here.

[Chinasaur]

http://ultimatebootcd.com/ - contains Ranish Partition manager. I've used it to setup partitions..don't know if it can repair MBR's.

A Knoppix CD would let you read your NTFS partition and get your files.

Best of luck.


:cheers:

[willy1]

Thanks, Chinasaur.

I have a Knoppix CD here - I'll give that a try.

[GHOST]

how about knoppix bootable cd. should be able to open your windows folder if it is good. i do not know how to repair it , but it should be able to copy it to media or another drive.

i used to reload win xp often and formatted and lost all my files. then i learned, when it gets to the point it says format or leave present file system intact? leave present file system intact and all your files should still be there.

say my old user name was mike. i reinstall and use new user name mike1. there will be a folder mike with all old material in it.

[willy1]

Originally posted by Chinasaur
http://ultimatebootcd.com/ - contains Ranish Partition manager. I've used it to setup partitions..don't know if it can repair MBR's.

A Knoppix CD would let you read your NTFS partition and get your files.

Best of luck.


:cheers:

:notworthy :notworthy :notworthy THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU :notworthy :notworthy :notworthy


Partition Manager couldn't find or fix the partition table, but TestDisk on the UBCD found a good backup partition table and I was able to write it back to disk. Everything is back to normal in W2K, but I lost the boot manager program. No big deal, since the Mandrake install was only for fooling around.