I recently installed RedHat 8.0 on my computer but i discovered that i also needed to install windows for several programs that I still needed. I have two HDs, the RedHat install is on an 80Gb drive and the windows install is on an 8gb hard drive (which is the slave). I attempted to install windows on the slave but that is a no go so I powered down the computer and unhooked the ide cables making the 8gb hard drive the master and leaving the other drive without power and without an ide hookup. The windows install went as poorly as all the other windows installs I have ever done, but it was done in the end and I hooked up both drives in their previous configuration (80 Gb master, 8 Gb slave), but this time RedHat will not boot. All the hardware is properly detected but when it comes to mounting the root filesystem it fails completely. Now, in the original error, it complained about a bad superblock which I fixed with mkfs.ext3 -S. The next error was that the journal was not present which tune2fs -c seems to have fixed, because the error now reads: VFS: can't find ext3 filesystem on dev ide0(3,1). mount: error 22 mounting ext3 The kicker of all of this is that fdisk sees the partition just fine and reports that it is an ext3 filesystem with all the proper attributes, neither a boot floppy, nor the RedHat install disc can see the partition though. I have pretty important data on the drive so I don't want to just reformat and start over before I have exhausted all of my options. But at the moment I have no way of booting or seeing the main drive at all, I can only get into the linux rescue shell from the RedHat install and mounting the drive in the shell simply causes the shell to no longer recognize where its binaries are, so it has some effect, just nothing desirable. I really have two questions here. The obvious one is, how can I recover from this, if at all? The other is just as important to me: Why did this happen? The linux drive wasn't hooked up and it wasnt modified in anyway by the windows install (I installed 98 by the way) but somehow it no longer functioned afterward. Even if I can't recover my data, answering this question would make my day a lot better. Erin
On Mar 17, 2003 10:39 -0600, Erin Teachman wrote:> I recently installed RedHat 8.0 on my computer but i discovered that > i also needed to install windows for several programs that I still > needed. I have two HDs, the RedHat install is on an 80Gb drive and > the windows install is on an 8gb hard drive (which is the slave). I > attempted to install windows on the slave but that is a no go so I > powered down the computer and unhooked the ide cables making the 8gb > hard drive the master and leaving the other drive without power and > without an ide hookup.It is entirely possible that Windows wiped out your primary drive at this point. Windows always needs to be installed on drive C (primary).> Now, in the original error, it complained about a bad > superblock which I fixed with mkfs.ext3 -S. The next error was that > the journal was not present which tune2fs -c seems to have fixed, > because the error now reads:So, "mkfs.ext3 -S" is not a very good way to recover your filesystem. Much preferred is "e2fsck -b 4096 -B 32768" or similar. If it gets to the point where all of your superblocks are bad (which are distributed across your entire disk) chances are that the rest of the filesystem has been corrupted also.> The kicker of all of this is that fdisk sees the partition just fine > and reports that it is an ext3 filesystem with all the proper > attributes.That's because you did "mkfs.ext3 -S", which wrote a superblock on the disk.> see the partition though. I have pretty important data on the drive > so I don't want to just reformat and start over before I have > exhausted all of my options.Backups... Failing that, you can use "strings" or some other binary editor to search for your data on the disk, and start copying out the blocks. This works OK if you have text data, much less well otherwise.> The other is just as important to me: Why did this happen? The linux > drive wasn't hooked up and it wasnt modified in anyway by the windows > install (I installed 98 by the way) but somehow it no longer > functioned afterward. Even if I can't recover my data, answering this > question would make my day a lot better.It was connected the first time you tried to install windows. Sadly, windows has the "feature" that if it can't read the drive it assumes it hasn't been formatted and proceeds to format the disk (saving you the effort of doing it yourself). Cheers, Andreas -- Andreas Dilger http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/ http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/