[jonah]

hi can anyone please help me, i seem to have lost my entire dual boot system.

i'll try to clearly explain what i was trying to do and what happened.

ok well i added a second harddrive to my computer which already had xp and suse 9.3 on dual boot on the old harddrive. i added the other as a slave and wanted to norton ghost the windows partition to the slave disk freeing up more space for suse. however as the added disk was smaller than the windows partition it wouldn't let me, so i reduced the windows partition on my old drive to try and fit it on the new one. i got an error message halfway through resizing though. and then windows wouldn't boot, i'd lost windows but i could still open up the folders and things from suse which thankfully would still boot. woohoo i thought, all is not lost. all i thought i would have to do is then install windows on the second drive freshly and then drag the old files from the first disk over. then i could remove the old windows partition and increase suse's space to fill the larger first harddrive.

so i re-installed windows making sure to disable the old drive in bios and choose to install on the slave. windows had no problem with this and installed fine. i was celebrating!! so after booting windows up for the first time i see from my computer that the other drive is showing up but it says it's not formatted! i panic and reboot - bang, no linux now either, all i have is a fresh install of windows. so i run the suse disc to try and recover lost partitions, it springs up with a message that it can't open the drive with the parition manager but it finds a small 9meg partition and a large one too under "recover lost" partition in "expert tools", but says then says again that it can't recover them after trying.

can anyone please please help, i've lost a lot of stuff and i know it was ridiculous of me not backing up but i was ignorant to just how tricky this kind of thing is!! any solutions to recover my work from windows, suse setup disks or any other ways? thanks if anyone can help.

[RustamB]

Originally Posted by jonah

.......so i re-installed windows making sure to disable the old drive in bios and choose to install on the slave....

Disabling drive in BIOS will not stop windows from locating it, so it's normal that you see Linux partition as not formatted one Do you see any partitions on it when you view it with partition magic or other? Did you try just to attache the old drive to its original location (ide1 it was, wasn't it?) and rewrite MBR from rescue CD, and try to boot?

[jonah]

i'll check it with partition magic when i get home and get back to you. i've only tried to recover from linux setup discs so far. i didn't try from windows because nothing is yet installed on the new windows drive. i hope i can recover this stuff. i'll get back to you about it, thanks so much for replying.

[oldcpu]

Originally Posted by jonah

hi can anyone please help me, i seem to have lost my entire dual boot system.

ok well i added a second harddrive to my computer which already had xp and suse 9.3 on dual boot on the old harddrive. i added the other as a slave and wanted to norton ghost the windows partition to the slave disk freeing up more space for suse. however as the added disk was smaller than the windows partition it wouldn't let me, so i reduced the windows partition on my old drive to try and fit it on the new one. i got an error message halfway through resizing though. and then windows wouldn't boot, i'd lost windows but i could still open up the folders and things from suse which thankfully would still boot. woohoo i thought, all is not lost. all i thought i would have to do is then install windows on the second drive freshly and then drag the old files from the first disk over. then i could remove the old windows partition and increase suse's space to fill the larger first harddrive.

so i re-installed windows making sure to disable the old drive in bios and choose to install on the slave. windows had no problem with this and installed fine. i was celebrating!! so after booting windows up for the first time i see from my computer that the other drive is showing up but it says it's not formatted! i panic and reboot - bang, no linux now either, all i have is a fresh install of windows. so i run the suse disc to try and recover lost partitions, it springs up with a message that it can't open the drive with the parition manager but it finds a small 9meg partition and a large one too under "recover lost" partition in "expert tools", but says then says again that it can't recover them after trying.

can anyone please please help, i've lost a lot of stuff and i know it was ridiculous of me not backing up but i was ignorant to just how tricky this kind of thing is!! any solutions to recover my work from windows, suse setup disks or any other ways? thanks if anyone can help.

I'm slightly puzzled by what you have done.

Please, before all of this started, with your dual boot, what program did you use for a boot manager? Linux Grub? Windows Boot Magic?

Am I correct that:
(a) You have a master drive (disabled in BIOS) that has your linux partition and a corrupt windows partition.
(b) You have a slave drive (enabled in BIOS) with windows, that boots OK.

What size are these partitions (linux probably has multiple, such as its swap, etc ...) ?

I added a second drive to my SuSE-9.3 linux less than 2 weeks ago, with no problems. Presumeably if you renable the master drive in your BIOS, and adjust the boot sequence, it will boot to your Boot Manager (which is ??? ) and you will select the appropriate drive (corrupted XP or Linux). You will need to adjust the Boot Manager to remove your corrupted XP, and add your new second drive to your Boot Manager.

When you booted from "the suse disc to try and recover lost partitions", and it gave you "a message that it can't open the drive with the parition manager", just what did you do to recover?? I'm afraid here is where you could have done something unrecoveable, but hopefully not.

Please, some more information, per the questions above, so we can help.

[jonah]

> Disabling drive in BIOS will not stop windows from locating it, so it's
>normal that you see Linux partition as not formatted one Smile Do you see
>any partitions on it when you view it with partition magic or other? Did you
>try just to attache the old drive to its original location (ide1 it was, wasn't
>it?) and rewrite MBR from rescue CD, and try to boot?

ok when i book windows and use partition manager the other drive just comes up labelled as "BAD" and has no partitions on there!

>Please, before all of this started, with your dual boot, what program did
>you use for a boot manager? Linux Grub? Windows Boot Magic?

Grub

>Am I correct that:

>(a) You have a master drive (disabled in BIOS) that has your linux
>partition and a corrupt windows partition.

yes that is correct but i've since re-enabled the drive in bios but it won't boot at all. i'm not even sure anything at all is on it and whether its completely corrupt or not.

>(b) You have a slave drive (enabled in BIOS) with windows, that boots
>OK.
yeah, windows is booting fine from the slave drive, this is the fresh install and new drive which i wanted to copy my old windows docs on to

>What size are these partitions (linux probably has multiple, such as its
>swap, etc ...) ?
i don't know the partition sizes anymore because i can't access them but the drive 160gb and about 20 of that was for linux. i wanted more space for suse so i bought the 80gig drive to move windows to.

>I added a second drive to my SuSE-9.3 linux less than 2 weeks ago,
>with no problems. Presumeably if you renable the master drive in your
>BIOS, and adjust the boot sequence, it will boot to your Boot Manager
>(which is ??? ) and you will select the appropriate drive (corrupted XP or
>Linux). You will need to adjust the Boot Manager to remove your
>corrupted XP, and add your new second drive to your Boot Manager.

yeah this is what i tried but somewhere along the way it's all been lost, it must of been the windows install on the slave that's corrupted the master drive possibly? and now partition magic is just showing the whole drive as "BAD"

>When you booted from "the suse disc to try and recover lost partitions",
>and it gave you "a message that it can't open the drive with the parition
>manager", just what did you do to recover?? I'm afraid here is where
>you could have done something unrecoveable, but hopefully not.

i was trying to recover anything i could, the drive has no windows or suse on it and i thought recovering partitions may fix it.

>Please, some more information, per the questions above, so we can
>help.

anything else you need and i'll try my best, i'm not so good at this stuff (as i've proven!!) thanks for any help.

[oldcpu]

Originally Posted by jonah

i thought recovering partitions may fix it.

This reads like you changed the partition on the primary drive? ... Did you also by chance format the drive (I hope not)??

If you did change the partitions (and did not format), maybe if you put them back to what they were before, you may be able to recover? Thats a guess on my part.

Apologies, but this has gone beyond my expertise to help. Hopefully someone else can suggest something here.

For future reference, download and burn yourself a free Knoppix live CD, and keep it handy for emergency purposes. It can come in handly for checking the health of non-bootable paritions, at times like this, before one tries to "recover". You could still try Knoppix now, but I have a bad feeling that you changed the drive's partitions.

Also, for future reference, make detailed notes (and put them aside for emergencies) as to the exact size/mapping/location (etc) of the partitions on your drives.

[__Virus__]

i dint read all the stuff except tht u told sumthn like "drive not formatted" in windows..happened with me too...wht i did is installed mandrake and wooh i was able to access all partitions blv me..wingays said free space even with its boot disk..linux read all....winshit cant read its own partitions linux can atleast for me..so thts wht i did

[jonah]

thanks for everyone's help. i seem to have got most stuff back now from a totally currupted disk drive, i used a program called file scavenger, it's awesome for getting your lost stuff back.

[oldcpu]

Originally Posted by jonah

thanks for everyone's help. i seem to have got most stuff back now from a totally currupted disk drive, i used a program called file scavenger, it's awesome for getting your lost stuff back.

Glad to read you recovered most of your data. Best wishes now to you in your re-installation efforts.