Apparent Damage Master Boot Record

[exdol]

I was just installing smoothwall 2.0 on a drive which had Redhat 9.0 on it before. Installation went as documented. However after rebooting, POST came up, after which only 1s and 0s were being displayed.

Some Colleagues say the master boot record may be damaged. How would I repair this using Linux. Winwoes XP has a tool but I think if I use it I will loose the data on the drive. In this case I want to loose it, but what if I didn't want to?

Peace

[Gillion]

Boot with a linux rescue disk and rerun the grub/lilo tool.

I am not up with smoothwall so maybe they have a resuce mode... boot:/dev/hda6 ? thats what i use to boot a system with a hamstrung MBR

There are fixit tools online that can fix it for you that run in dos or windows on floppy or cdrom... please search fresh meat. I know if you want you can download UltimateBoot CD

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

If you don't have the windows or linux bitkeeper client you can get the zip file from using a link at...

http://freshmeat.net/projects/ultima...?topic_id=1031

--gillion

[doors]

If you would had the first SuSE cd or the SuSE repair diskette in hand you could run the repair drive option and use the customizable tab and click repair master boot record.

Instead you could use the FDisk MBR in the recovery console, but as you said you could loose data that way, therefore there are some recovery software out there that can recover your system from a damage master boot recod. Can't give any names at this moment but I have used a few.

But the SuSE 9 1st cd can be use as a good recovery program.

i don't really think that if you use the recovery console on xp it will remove your data, when I had my MBR problem I was going to use it, and I got the same caution message, but I went on. The only thing it did was to remove the GRUB bootloader and replace it with the windows bootloader, so that only windows alone could boot.

Therefore the only thing you have to do is to install back GRUB or LILO and configure it.

That's what I did and all my files were still in tact.

[exdol]

Is it conclusive that the displaying of 1s and 0s means that the MBR is damaged?

[Gillion]

yes... it means your ipl didn't load properly... load it again.

--gillion