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Re: [PLUG] Help with dual boot disaster
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Sam Hunting wrote:
>
> Hi--
>
> After about a month, my dual boot Windows 2000 Professional/Red Hat 7.2
> Sony Viao laptop, when in Windows mode, gave me a blue screen of death,
> and when I rebooted, an "operating system not found" message. Booting
> the machine from DOS on a floppy shows that no drives... The disk was
> partitioned with Partition Magic. The last software I installed (in
> Windows) was a Bernouili CD burner (ironically, for the backups I
> didn't perform).
What partition type is Win2000 using? You might not see the drives with
DOS (I'm not a Win2000 user, but do have Win98 SE on a Viao.)
How about using a Linux rescue disk? You should be able to boot and see
the partitions. If you don't, then the partition table may be lost. Do
you have a printout of or recall the partition configuration? It's
possible to re-write a partition table and restore the machine in some
cases. If you try this, make sure you save a copy of any partition info
you see on the first try, in case you make a mistake and need to go
back.
The easiest path might be:
- Boot Linux rescue disk
- Partitions are okay, so mount the windows drive.
- Swap to a blank windows floppy, and mount it.
- Copy the files from the windows partition you need to save to floppy
- unmount the floppy
- re-install the system as you like
(Of course, if re-writing the partition table works, your machine will
be back to normal and you won't need to do any of this.)
Have you done a couple complete power cycles and checked the BIOS
settings to make sure the Viao still has the hard drive set correctly?
I've seen a couple odd occurrences on a Viao that went away after a
clean re-boot. Even had 2 or 3 lockups that required removing both the
power cord and the battery to reboot the system (under Linux, never
Windows.)
>
> Obviously, I want to reconfigure the machine as Linux only, but is
> there any way I can get my Windows data back? (There's about 5 days of
> Python coding on it I want to get back...
>
> Thanks a lot for any help you can give.
>
> Sam Hunting
--
Kevin Brosius
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