Last weekend I created a new partition (in XP) on my second hard drive (the one on which Linux is installed). Last night I had to re-image because I messed the NT Kernel up. Anyway now I no longer have the option to dual boot and the boot disk that I originally created doesn't work as all the partition numbers on the hard drive have changed.

I tried to get rid of the new partiton but I get an PM gives me an error message (1556 - if anyone knows what this stands for, please indulge!)

Anyway is there a way to get the "standard" file (the one which I have to point boot.ini to), in order to get XP to see and load Linux.......

Any help will be much appreciated!!!

So what happens, what do you mean no longer can dual boot, LILO or Grub doesn't come up?

Or when you select XP it doesn't boot?
Or when you select Linux it doesn't boot?

Oh and beware PM is a monster hehe unless you backup your data and make it's rescue disks, but they don't always work!

#Garry

I've just re-read my original post and it does sound confusing!

Last week my system used to dual boot to both Linux and XP. Xp was my first OS and also on the MBR. I can't remember if I used GRUB or LILO....but out of the two I think it could have been LILO.

Two days ago the XP kernel got all messed up and wouldn't boot. However Linux worked fine except for one error which I was looking into. I had created a new partition on my second harddrive using PM. I think that becuase of this the partition numbers as seen by Linux (HDB0,HDB1....) changed around. So I was getting an error message about the swap not mounting properly......non-the-less Linux did work.

In order to fix XP the only solution I had was to re-image an old Image back on to the first hard drive. That was succesful but in doing so I copied over the little Linux boot file which I was refering to in Boot.ini so that NTLDR would boot Linux. Now there is no way for me to make/get that file again.

Whats more I can not even boot into Linux from my floppy as I get the following error message:
"VFS can't find ext3 filesystem on dev ide0(3, 73)
mount: error 22 mounting ext3
pivotroot: pivot_root (/sysroot, /sysroot +/initrd) failed : 2
.....Kernel panic: no init found"

The default boot location was /dev/hdb9, which produced the above error. I also tried to boot from linux by (making up?) using the following command at the floppy boot prompt:
"linux boot /dev/hdb8" - which also produced the error and
"linux boot /dev/hdb10" - which also did the same.

Is there any way to maybe access a recovery concole of sorts......phew!


Cheers!!!

....Oh yeah and when I use the PM boot disks i get an error about BIOS and something about blosk size!

Geeez man it really sounds like your partition tables or something are really screwed, this happened to me aswell, well along these lines, you might have to try this, got a windows m.e or 98 bootdisk, put that in then run 'scandisk' so that can get rid of all those crappy windows errors that may be around, then you might have to get into your recovery console...ummm what distro are you using? Well anyway make sure your bios can boot from c.d's, then there should be an option to get into recovery mode, do a 'fsck' on your Linux partition, then run fdisk /dev/hda (or whatever corresponds to your system) and try get it to fix your tables and such, if not you might have to re-install everything and try again, but we won't do that just yet, that will be our last resort....

Hope this made sense cause it looks all squashed together to me

#Garry

OK.....here's whats happened so far.....
I ran scandisk and there were no errors...
So I tried to boot of the CD which worked....however I didn't see any option to go into recovery mode....But I did actaully find out what the partition number had changed to...Initially the root was on /dev/hdb9...but now it was on /dev/hdb8!

Soooo....I rebooted with my Linux boot disk and typed in the following:
"Linux single root=/dev/hdb8 initrd="......
And.....it worked....

Well almost!

Several errors popped up on the screen:
"swapon: /dev/hdb10: invalid aragument FAILED"
and
"mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb5 FAILED"

After this it created the swap file and I ended up at the prompt.....
So i thought this was probably the recovery mode thingy and typed FSCK and it did something at the end of which some i_blocks were fixed....

So I re-booted and.......
same error's again - only this time it did something to the root filesystem - along the lines of:
"root filesystem was not cleanly mounted"

Anyway I'm gonna have dinner in a bit and give it one more try...if not then looks like I'll either have to upgrade/re-install...

Oh by the way I'm using Red Hat Linux 8...