Partition Magic

ThisBullet · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 24 Sep 2004 Posts: 81

Hello. I was in partition magic recently and i was resizing my partitions. I decreased my windows storage partition so i could alot more space for the gentoo partition. I did so and im pretty sure i just altered those two as i wanted to do. I then rebooted and let partition magic actually do what it had to do. After that i restarted. Then my dell logo came up and after that should be lilo's boot menu. Well guess what. no boot menu. instead

ikshaar · Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2005 10:19 pm Post subject:

<rant> Dell+Windows+Partition Magic = the absolute opposite of "openness" </rant>

The only thing I can think of is to regain access to the Gentoo partition : boot the liveCD, mount your gentoo partition to be sure it is still intact (!) and, if it is, install grub on a floppy. This way you have a safe boot disk for Gentoo, without need to touch the MBR.

I know you said you use lilo but i don't know lilo... if you can use grub, try it. Otherwise see if lilo can do same trick.

If grub works, you can try to boot Windows from it. But no guarantee on that.

Dell has some special tricks of configuration which usually make it impossible to recover...

PS: for DHCP not working, follow same procedure as you did from installation.... if you don't have DHCP , use fix IP.
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ebrostig · Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2005 10:55 pm Post subject:

if you have any way of booting from a Windows disk. you can also try 'fdisk /mbr'

Erik
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ChojinDSL · l33t Joined: 07 Jul 2003 Posts: 784

Dont know if this helps or not, but back when I was using lilo as a bootmanager, whenever I installed a new kernel, I would have to run /sbin/lilo
If I forgot to do that, then the error you describe would happen. Or something similar.

d_adams · Apprentice Joined: 20 Oct 2003 Posts: 223

Ran into this one before, try booting from a win98 boot floppy, and then run testdisk from http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html to repair the partitions. It works for windows and linux partitions.
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ThisBullet · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 24 Sep 2004 Posts: 81

i ran testdisk. the drive with lilo and linux and windows storage is reading about 2gb. the drive is a 20gb harddrive. the partitions cannot be repaired. /sbin/lilo did not work and im thinking of clearing the mbr as a last resort. does anyone have any ideas on how i can get this thing to read correctly? Thanks
peace out.

Headrush · Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2005 5:40 pm Post subject: