Re: my NTFS disk broken by Grub Legacy

[Uwe Dippel]

Olle Bergkvist wrote:

> >What I'd do, is booting Knoppix, check if that partition shows as 
> potential >mount on the desktop (hda1, eventually). If not, I'd do
> >fdisk /dev/hda (or whatever it is, probably hda or sda). And I'd do 
> an 'su' >on the terminal as well, before.
> >Then we can see what your disk contains.
> >Which would be needed before any file repair system could enter the 
> scene.
> >
>
> > Uwe
>
>
> Thanks. Here's the full output of fdisk and dd. (The outfiles of dd 
> are attached.) I dont think that this is going to help, though.  8-(


No, the outfiles don't. But I didn't ask for them. You have only 
answered one of my two questions:

> Disk /dev/hda: 82.3 GB, 82348277760 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 10011 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
>
>    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/hda1   *           1        2611    20972826    7  HPFS/NTFS
> /dev/hda2            4790       10011    41945715    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)

which shows that your Windows partition is there, in whichever shape or 
content.

What about this question:

> >What I'd do, is booting Knoppix, check if that partition shows as 
potential >mount on the desktop (hda1, eventually). ?

*is* there an icon ?
I see you know your way around on the command line pretty well, so you 
can just

cd /mnt/
mount hda1
df -h
ls -l hda1

on Knoppix instead, and post the relevant outcome here.


Uwe

> By the way, I dont still beleive that  "embed" was the problem. Now i 
> beleive it simply was "install" and "setup".

Computer Science is not so much about believing, but about proper 
analysis. That's what I'm trying here with you.

> Until yesterday, (hd[number],[number]) was the only way to name a disk 
> in Grub that i knew about. I didnt knew that (hd[number]) was valid too.

Google for MBR. The first sector isn't (hdn,m).

> Setup or Install does not complain about the first syntax, and not 
> even "help install" or "help setup" has any information about this. 

No need to complain, because it is needed in some cases. Have you read 
the documentation about grub (the relevant passages used to be way 
'behind' in the manual, I agree) ?
Often,
info grub
helps better

> But setup (hd0,0) or "install STAGE1 (hd0,0) STAGE2" may destroy the 
> partition, though these commands shouldnt normally write any data to 
> any partition.

See above. Don't make assumptions, please. setup (hdn,m) does not 
destroy the partition. RTFM, please.

> In my opinion its not secure that the so called automatic command 
> setup, or install,  wrties data to a the wrong place on the disk 
> without a warning.

Here I kind of agree with you. I *never* use that, I always use the 
floppy (or SuperGrub), because both give me tab-completion of disks, 
partitions, types and files before install, as well as 'find'.
You could have found this suggestion in the archives, manuals and info grub.

> That is important to improve in GRUB 2.

IMHHO this is difficult, because at that stage you / GRUB don't see the 
disks from a 'virgin' stage any longer, but necessarily from a mounted, 
running, operating system.
In 99% of the cases (or more), the what-you-call 'automatic command 
setup, or install' *does* write into the correct places; and from your 
layout (fdisk), I bet, grub knows how to write to the correct place in 
your case as well. So let's find out what went wrong ...