All,
Since nobody has replied to my earlier post, please let me narrow the question down a bit:
After FC2 installation bug WinXP boot failure and recovery according to the SFDISK method, but stuck with a XP that boots half-way but fails at Mup.sys; Do you think it's safe to format the WinXP partition reinstall WinXP without risking to mess up the partition table and/or loose data on the data partitions?
This all seems to be user dependent. You have to be aware of the reformating actions during the XP install.
Please reply, I'm not sure how the disk geometry is written on disk and what risks re-partitioning after the FC2 installation bug there might be.
Thanks in advance But, WinXP itself is not booting further than Windows\System32\drivers\Mup.sys when in Safe Mode.
This seems to take forever when entering safe mode. I think that it will eventually pass this delay. I thought that the system was hung when I first saw this in safe mode before. You might want to look up what mups does on the Internet.
If neccessary, I can sacrifice my current WinXP installation and reinstall it, but I'd prefer to get it running. What I'm really
worried about is loosing any data on hda7/8 and I'd prefer not to be
forced to back up ~100GB of raw audio and video along with scans and
documents on DVD-R/W... and especially when not used to burning media
on Linux.
If you partitioned your machine with this layout. I assume you could be cautious. Running a backup on the important data is probably the best, incremental or full.
I'm not sure how disk geometry works so that is why I haven't dared to reinstall WinXP in case the other partitions are blown to bits in case the disk is repartitioned or otherwise disk geometry is again rewritten during WinXP installation.
Running a Samsung SP1614N 160GB on a Shuttle motherboard with nForce2
chipset. No third party software has been used. No other ways attempted for recovery, apart from the sfdisk operations mentioned,
so I hope everything is still intact.
Very very thankful for help!
Yours
Mkn.
Ps. I'm not sure what the empty hda4 partition is doing there, but I guess that's because only three primary partitions are used..?
It looks like it represents zero to infinity :-) -
Being that it starts at cylinder 0, it might be the effects of damage to your boot sector.
I think that /dev/hda2 contains your valued partitions, as a container.
My idea is to boot into XP and enter the command shell. Then fix the mbr. PLEASE do a backup for that much valued data before loosing this data.
Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 0+ 1019 1020- 8193118+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/hda3 * 1020 1032 13 104422+ 83 Linux /dev/hda2 1033 19456 18424 147990780 f W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/hda5 1033+ 1096 64- 514048+ 82 Linux swap /dev/hda6 1097+ 2039 943- 7574616 83 Linux /dev/hda7 2040+ 14787 12748- 102398278+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/hda8 14788+ 19456 4669- 37503711 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
Jim
-- Pardon this fortune. Database under reconstruction.
