Boot Sector and Cordless MX700 Duo

[Senzafine]

Recently my boyfriend and I (the linux user out of the two of us) upgraded his system. He had Linux and Windows 2000 Pro on two different harddrives and was able to choose, on startup, which one to log into. We put in a new mobo and processor, and then Windows could no longer boot. It would give us a blue screen with a message that explicitly stated something about his boot sector... and then we'd have ot reboot.

Linux worked fine, but now it doesn't. He did something (lol) and now when he boots even from his slackware floppy disk it can't find any of the boot sector information.

We were going to burn a copy of Knoppix to disc and then try and run that straight from CD ROM and repair the boot sector or something somehow... but we're not sure if it will work. Reformatting is an option, but certainly an undesireable one. We're already worried it will have hurt his harddrive partitions on the Windows drive, on top of the fact it now lacks a boot sector.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what to do to save his information? Windows won't read Linux files, so we can't just put his harddrive in my computer and move the info over...

Also, does anyone have any experience with the Logitech MX700 Duo cordless keyboard/mouse set and Slackware? He was going to buy one but neither of us knew how well the drivers for it worked on Linux (which he uses far more than windows).

Thank you all for any help!

[lordnothing]

on the boot sector part, are you using GRUB or lilo?? if you're using GRUB, you'll need to re-write it to the boot sector... there's a GRUB tutorial here on the forums... if it's lilo, you can rewrite the boot sector by simply typing lilo from a shell prompt... you may have to do this from inside a chroot environment... i would recommend a gentoo livecd for that.... since knoppix will not allow you to login as root....

[Senzafine]

I don't know if he's using grub or lilo... I will find out though. What is the most reliable way to get gentoo? I know the Knoppix download has taken nearly all day... but I suspect he will need to login as root for something like repairing his boot sector.

I have BitTorrent so I guess that'll be the first place I try... aside from Google

Thanks!

[lordnothing]

http://gentoo.org

gentoo's liveCD's are generally used for installing gentoo, but they're also handy for using as a rescue disk, since you're logged in as root the whole time...

if you need help with chroot'ing, post again, and if i don't know the answer, someone surely will...

[Senzafine]

We got it, thanks sooo much... it all works now and gentoo was great.

Now we just need to get his Windows 2k working again... but that shouldn't be too hard now that he can at least access his Slackware Linux.