bad partition table

[bof]

i have a strange prob with my HDS. when i open partition magic, it displays "BAD" for the second hd, but i still can access my partitions and boot red hat wich is on this hd. How can i repair this without formatting the hd?

 

[aixenv]

well for the redhat part why don't you do two things

man fsck

then when you understand what this utility is used for;

boot into single user mode and type fsck /

this is basically the linux/UNIX equivalent of scandisk/defrag;

this will let you know if there are any bad sectors on your nix slices; if it returns an error it "should" fix it, if i cant fix it you'll know, on the windows side you could do the same if you can access it, defrag then do scandisk, also you might have a corrupt MBR (master boot record) but i'd think if that was the case your system wouldnt be able to choose between redhat and linux;

also, i havent done it recently but you can do

cat /etc/fstab and this shows your file system table, one of those /dev/hdaXX should be your /mnt/windows or something related to your windows partition, you could mount that partition and fsck /partitionname from *nix which could fix errors if windows isnt bootable

make sense?

lemme know if you need further assistance, if there's one thing i know it's UNIX/Linux (10yrs sysadmin), you guys have the oc'n,mainstream hardware knowledge on me though

aix

 

[stevty2889]

If it is running fine, I'm not sure I would mess with it, because trying to make it stop saying bad when it's running fine, may actualy cause you to loose your data..

 

[Steve]

There's an obscure DOS utility for PM that will safely allow you to relabel the "bad" partition so you can carry on. In the meantime do not do a scandisk or chkdsk as you could corrupt your data.

 

[bof]

Originally posted by: stevty2889
If it is running fine, I'm not sure I would mess with it, because trying to make it stop saying bad when it's running fine, may actualy cause you to loose your data..

yeah i know but i want to remove RH9 and iwon't be able to do that if i cant see the partitions

 

[bof]

sm8000 what is that obscure DOS command. By the way i have another minor prob. my win partition has the D letter atached to it insted of C. it's a little anoying because i have system files iin my C partition wich is where i store my mp3 and it's also pretty confusing...can i change this?

 

[Steve]

Might be possible. I'll have to take a look when I get home from work for that little program.

 

[bof]

oh aixenv the fsck thing doesnt work, i get bash command not found or somethin like that. i tried everythin fsck -a, fsck -p, all the options that were in the man pages, . i also couldnt use fstab, i dunno why, anyway don't get all technical on me, im a total noob in RH. All my partitions are ok i can access all of them and i can boot on winxp. anyway are you sure repairing my linux partitions will repair my partition table?