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HELP needed... lost data in partition! |SOLVED|

T

thornc

Golden Member
Hi all,

Just got myself into a mess...
Here's what happened: I was trying out a new linux distro called "Caixa Magica" [local
portugueese distro: "Magic Box" in English] and the installer of this thingh installed
lilo on my main windows 2000 paritition (fat32), and worst yet it tried and failled to install
lilo on the MBR also... so I was left with no w2k boot and linux was only booting from
a floppy!

To solve the problem I runned the recovery console in windows 2000 and used fixmbr.
Result, the Lilo on the windows partition (/dev/hda1) worked fine and I booted into linux!
So I booted into the recovery console and used fixboot.
Now the only think I get is NTDLR missing at boot time!!!

I've used a win98 bootdisk, and it says that my windows partition is FAT12 partition and it's
empty... I've used the recovery console and it say my partition is FAT32 and its empty!
I've used Partition Magic, and it says the partition is FAT32 and has 8MB free, but
it can't make sense out of it see it can't read the fat tables....

What to do???
Does any of you know of any good low-level partition reader that can help me read my
data back...
Any other ideas are welcome..

Thanks


edit: SOLVED...read bellow!
 
Windows-based diagnostic tools are garbage if you ask me.

Have you tried mounting the partition in Linux?

mount -t vfat /dev/windows partition /mnt/someplace
 
Common give me some credit...

I already tried that and fsck.msdos!
A list of the mounted windows partition only shows garbage as the filenames...
and fsck says that both fat tables are corrupt and stops!!

Thanks anyway!
 
If both FATs are corrupt you're screwed, there's no other backups.

If you have a copy of Norton Disk Doctor for DOS (well the DOS exe that comes with the Win9X versions, otherwise you run the risk of losing all LFNs if it does work) try that, I've used it to recover partitions before, but I've never had both FATs corrupted.
 
Managed to solve the problem....
The damn distro installer installed lilo on /dev/hda1 !!!

I choose to install in the linux root directory, but the thing
installed on the windows directory!!!

A /sbin/lilo -U did the trick!!

 
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