Formatting Hangs, Boot Loader doesnt Load, Windows XP is screwed!

[JRSampson]

Ok. I've got 2 hard drives, the primary runs Windows XP, the slave runs Suse 10.1. Well....they 'did' run. All of a sudden my Lilo Boot Loader got screwed up and stopped loading.

Case 1: No boot loader. I could not get into any of my operating systems without Lilo, my MBR was totally messed up. I removed my Windows XP drive and tried booting my Suse drive, however, Lilo was on the primary drive and so my slave drive had absolutely no boot loader whatsoever. Switching back to my windows XP drive, I tried doing a restore, then I tried the 'fixmbr' command, which brought me back to restore, after restoring and restarting, i get back to the restore screen, over and over, and over, and over, no matter how many times i complete the restore, it just goes back to the restore screen.

Case 2: Back to the Suse Linux drive. I used my windows xp disk to delete all partitions on my suse drive, I then tried to reinstall suse 10.1. The installation failed because it would not detect my hard drive. I then back it up to Suse 9.1, the installation gets all the way to the formatting stage and hangs at 64% everytime. The installation had actually completed once, but after restarting the system I got the error message "boot loader failed to load". Back to square one, formatting and reinstalling, hanging at 64%, only this time it doesnt seem to want to go any further.

I could simply do a destructive restore with my windows XP drive and start from scratch, but that would mean losing the thousands of pictures and video clips i have of my children and family members. I would very much like to save these files and all the other data files that are important to me.

Anyone have any advice? Any information that would help me to get this Suse Linux installed so I can set my xp drive as slave and hopefully transfer my important files off of the HD.

[sstray]

I have a Similar problem, but will ask for advice in another thread

A utility i found, which enabled me to boot into windows again is

Super Grub Boot Disk.

As you have made a post, I am assuming you have access to another machine
so, go here http://adrian15.raulete.net/grub/

Download, and burn a boot disk.
One option, under the "Windows" menu, allows you to fix the mbr for a number of windows versions. Hopefully, this will at least allow you to recover your files, if nothing else.

[devils casper]

Un-plug Windows Harddisk and Plug-in Second HardDisk as Primary Master. install SuSe in it and select GRUB as Boot Loader this time. it very easy to tweak GRUB.
after SuSe Installation, Plug-in Windows HardDisk as Secondry ( Slave ) and follow instructions from here to add an entry of Windows in GRUB.

for fixing WIndows Harddisk, download Windows 98 Bootable Floppy from www.bootdisk.com. boot up from Floppy and execute

A:\> fdisk /mbr

this command will rewrite MBR.






Casper