I have a server running FC2, it's been working a treat for months but today I shut it down to move it and when I booted it back up I just get "missing operating system". My first thought was one of the IDE cables had come out but no so, all the connections are good and the BIOS can see the disk. I booted from the FC setup CD and took the rescue option. hda was sucessfully mounted so I know the disk is readable so I can only assume the MBR is messed up.

What I'm after are some suggestions for making the disk bootable again, in the dim and distant past I've used fdisk /mbr on M$ systems, is there an equivalent for the Linux OS?

Please any help would be gratefully received as I can't get to my system :-(

Thanks in advance

Steve

Hi Steve,

Are you using grub or lilo as your
boot-loader?


Cheers,
Tink

ummmmm......

I just let Fedora configure the partitions etc when I set it up so I'm using whatever the default is! How can I check?

Thanks

grub is what he is using

Grub is the default option...

You get text across your screen saying 'Grub Loading Stage 2' or something similar before the o/s chooser screen comes up.

I get nothing at all, it's as if the disk is unformatted (which it isn't because I've mounted it and can read the data.

This gets more interesting now....


I tried the following

- insert installation cd1, reboot and write "linux rescue" and hit enter

- mount the installation (done automaticly in FE2 at least, not sure about others. If not just mount it)

- # chroot /mnt/sysimage (or wherever it was mounted)
- # grub-install /dev/hda
- # exit
- # exit


But an error was reported so I assume something 'bad' happened to the disk. I then re-installed FC 2 removing all current Linux partitions, the install went fine but it still wouldn't boot!! Same error message "missing operating system" I can't believe this!

So now I'm going to book from a DOS boot disk reomve all partitions and try again!

I'm afraid that your HDD may have a problem
with the boot-record.


Cheers,
Tink