[ale] Can no longer boot one of my drives

[Jim Lynch]

Trey Sizemore wrote:
> Hi all-
>
> I'm hoping someone can help with the issue I'm having.  Here's a quick
> rundown of the situation:
>
> Desktop machine with 2 500GB SATA drives.  One drive has both Windows
> VISTA (1st partition) and Fedora 7 (sda2 is / and sda3 is /home)
>
> Second drive only has only openSUSE 10.3 (sdb1 is /, sdb2 is swap, sdb3
> is /tmp and the rest is an LVM with HOME, OPT, USR, and VAR)
>
> I use GAG (boot loader) to boot and have entries for all 3 operating
> systems.  I have been using this setup successfully for quite a while
> now.
>
> I was most recently in openSUSE and shut down the machine Monday morning
> to go out of town.  When I came back last night, I could boot into
> either Vista or Fedora, but not openSUSE.  Trying to do so gives the
> error: "Sector boot not found or invalid".  
>
> I went into the "add an OS" setup to look at how the drives were being
> seen.  It looks like:
> Drive 1
> A Boot from floppy
> B 07h NTFS/Windows
> C 83h Linux EXT2
> D 83h Linux EXT2
>
> Drive2
> A Boot from floppy
> B 76h
>
> That's it for Drive2.
>
> I suppose it could be a bad drive, but I've not seen anything with the
> drive prior to this to suggest that.  The cabling looks good between the
> drive and motherboard.  Any ideas here as to how to go about
> troubleshooting and hopefully getting this drive back?
>
> Let me know if any more info is required, and thanks for any and all
> help!
>   
First thing I'd do is boot Fedora and  run fdisk -l as SU to see what 
the partition tables look like.
Then try to mount the partitions from SDB.  If they all mount, then run 
fsck on them after a umount.  If they are OK, the problem is with the 
boot  but I don't know anything about GAG so I can't help there.
Jim.