[ale] hard drive horrors

[Jeff Hubbs]

Look 
down thru man fdisk for the part about zeroing out the first 512 bytes of the 
drive so DOS doesn't freak.  That may be part of your 
problem.
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- 
Jeff
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  <FONT face=Tahoma 
  size=2>-----Original Message-----From: Jim Philips 
  [mailto:jim.philips at s1.com]Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2001 8:57 
  AMTo: 'ale at ale.org'Subject: [ale] hard drive 
  horrors
  I have been trying 
  all week to move over to a new 30 gig Western Digital hard drive. All Windows 
  files were copied. All Linux files were copied. I made tons of rescue disks, 
  boot disks and whatever and armed myself with printed copies of how-tos on 
  hard drive upgrades and lilo failures. And everything I try is 
  failing.
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  1. made a boot 
  disk with the mkbootdisk utility. This insists on booting hda3, but Linux is 
  now on hda2. Editing files on this disk has no effect.
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  2. made a boot 
  disk that copied my old /boot directory, but with updated lilo.conf and ran 
  lilo on this disk, per instructions in the hard drive upgrade mini how-to. 
  This disk will get so far in booting and then returns "ran out of 
  input".
  <SPAN 
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  3. used Tom's 
  root/boot disk to log in and mount hda2. I can do this fine. The lilo how-to 
  says you should run lilo with the "-r" flag to chroot lilo and execute it for 
  the mounted partition. This fails, because lilo can't find 
  execvp.
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  4. tried to boot 
  from an old boot disk and it causes a kernel panic.
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  5. in desperation, 
  tried to reinstall RedHat with a minimum install, so it would run lilo and 
  create a new boot disk. This gets to the "preparing to install" phase and then 
  just ceases to do anything. It can clearly access the new hard drive, but it 
  quits at the point mentioned. 
  <SPAN 
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  Everything looks 
  good when running fdisk in Linux. I have a Linux native partition and a swap 
  partition. If I run e2fsck on the partition, it checks out fine. Windows also 
  refuses to boot, because it doesn't seem to like changes made with the Linux 
  version of fdisk. I ran FDISK /MBR at the DOS prompt and this just made things 
  worse. I am running out of ideas and the documentation is certainly no help. I 
  can still re-install the old hard drive to do repair work, but I am completely 
  out of ideas.
  <SPAN 
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  Any 
  suggestions?
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