Windows XP kernel lost!!!!!!

[greenpenguin]

Windows Rocks

No vulgar language on ther forums please

[LinuxDude]

Like I said before "WHAT CAN I DO TO GET THIS FIXED!!!!"


I was thinking of buying a new hard drive, letting my friend install it, and put windows on it, Would that help?

[budman7]

In your original message you said that you put a boot dvd that came with it, and you used it to recover.

By that you meant that you have a recovery dvd and not a WinXP install disk.

When you first used it, how did you use it to recover, what commands did you use.

When you click on that /dev/hda1 icon on the knoppix desktop, can you see your Windows files, if you can't, your Windows is gone, and you will need to reinstall.

[twoHats]

First of all budman7 is the most patient person on the planet! I consider myself to be patient, being a teacher, but wow!

Secondly, what these nice folks are trying to tell you, is that when you format a partition, the level of difficulty to recover the data goes up like a rocket! Having a new drive with windows on it will not help, no matter how good your friend is. When you ran knoppix after the format - knoppix almost certainly used your swap partition and that means data was lost ...

My advice is:

1. When you ask a question on any technical forum, read and pay attention to the answer - each of your replys goes "<some stuff> and yes but how can i start windows...". We all understand that you want to start windows and that it "rocks" ... so why are you on a linux forum? Why not a windows forum?

2. Find a knowledgeable firm that can do HD forensics and ask them to save what they can. (if your data was valuable to you)

3. Don't mess with HD partitions again without thinking "do i know what i am doing?" and waiting for an answer.

Have fun rockin in the windows world...

[LinuxDude]

But , Just think about it!!!

The Knoppix damaged only the kernel on THAT Hard Drive, and formatted THAT hard drive so if i could get a NEW one and put it in there, it might just work!

And I've tried Win XP Install discs (CDs) but they do not work in the state that the PC is in now: "Kernel Files Missing from Disk, Insert System Diskette and reboot" And "Diskette" means floppy disk, am i right? But the pc i have dosent have a floppy drive in it.

The PC I have is a Insignia D400a w/ XP w/ SP2 installed when it came out of the box. http://<a href="http://www.insignia-...oducts.com</a>

[twoHats]

I am starting to think our chains are being yanked but here goes...

1. You, not linux, damaged your hard disk, and made it a swap partition, the next time you started, most live CDs including knoppix, would recognize the swap partition and use it.

2. Since your WinXP partition was now the swap partition, it would have been written into, thus your current problem.

3. What has been overwritten on that partition is unknown, but something almost certainly was.

4. Adding a new drive with XP on it will certainly allow you to boot into XP, but XP will not recognise the swap partition.

5. So now you have a brand new copy of XP and a disk that is "unknown", with, maybe some of your old data on it.

6. XP will not redcognise or read that partition unless you use some drive diagnostic tools and look at it as a raw partition. ie bytes with no particular ordering - which is very hard to interpret. Then there is the vast number of these bytes.

Go for it - it may keep you occupied for quite a while.

You might instead:

1. boot knoppix - with the option for not using the swap.

2. drop to root terminal in knoppix.

3. run fdisk /dev/hda (if that is your disk)

4. within fdisk look for a way to change the partition type.

5. change it to whatever you had b4 (ntfs/fat32?)

6. save changes.

7.try rebooting now.

The chances of this working are very low (depending on how the swap writes out) but still way better than using another drive.

- Tom

Any speling erors are the fault of this crappy keyboard!

[budman7]

When you click on that /dev/hda1 icon on the knoppix desktop, can you see your Windows files, if you can't, your Windows is gone, and you will need to reinstall.

Please answer this question.

This will tell you if you have any files left in XP

[jamey112]

Windows Rocks

No vulgar language on ther forums please

that cracked me up. thanks for the laugh.

[LinuxDude]

One time what i thought it would work was when i deleted the swap and then reformatted back to ntfs and i ran the recovery dvd again.
When I go in qtparted again it says 'ntfs' but i still cant boot xp.
I can see the files (/knoppix/home/hda1) of windows.

btw, When i enter the root termniaL and enter fdisk/ dev/hda1 and it says "cannot access hda1." [/code][/quote][/list]

[budman7]

After running the recovery dvd you still can't boot windows?
That is weird.

To access a partition in knoppix and make it writable, right click on the icon on the desktop. Select to mount it writable.