Help with dual boot!

[sethvath]

Hi I've previously installed suse linux and win xp on my laptop. Recently I switched to ubuntu 6.06 and now i cant boot into windows nor linux because lilo is no longer on the mbr??

I must have done something wrong while using gnome partition editor on the ubuntu live cd. fdisk -l shows:

Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 155061 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

and i get an error saying my cylinders are more than 1024 which might cause some boot time stuff like lilo and grub to malfunction

any help is greatly appreciated!
many thanks

[devils casper]

output of fdisk showing that there is no any partition in the disk. did you delete partitions ?





casper

[sethvath]

yes i did, formatted the former /home partition on dev/hda3. there's a swap and other /boot partition too and now they're not showing in disk manager either. is there any way to recover?

short of trying out fdisk /mbr because i do not have a windows emergency disk at the moment. any other steps i should attempt?

thanks for the reply

[devils casper]

you can download windows 98 bootable floppy from www.bootdisk.com... i dont think fdisk /mbr will do anything. there isn't any partition in disk.

well ! try bootable floppy. if this doesnt work then you can restore partition table through UBCD.




casper

[rcgreen]

If the system is unbootable, and the live cd tells
you that the hard drive has no partitions, there's
not much chance of recovering. Install again.
And pay particular attention to install the bootloader
onto /dev/hda. You'll have a bootable system.


P.S. The message about 1024 cylinders comes
up on all large hard drives, and can usually
be ignored

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO.html

[sethvath]

i recall amending the disk label in gparted. could that be the reason why the partitions are not shown? i'm quite sure the windows partition is still lying around

i've gotten hold of a ubcd but the active partition recovery tool doesnt seem to work. as for the rest of the disk manager tools like ranish, they cant see to detect the partitions. if my memory doesnt fail me,
hda1 == vfat (c drive)
hda2 == vfat (d drive)
hda3 == reiserfs (suse /home)
hda4 == reiserfs (suse /)
hda5 == swap

thanks casper and rcgreen for your advice