Hi all,

Please forgive me in advance for this long-winded query, but I would
really like some assistance on a major problem.

I have a system running Win98SE, and recently added a second HDD and
tried installing RedHat 7.3 the new Samsung 80GB HDD. I let the
installer chose most of the default settings, except I chose the LILO
bootloader instead of GRUB (since that is what I have always used in the
past).

When I restarted the machine, LILO gave the error "L AA AA AA AA". A
search on the net indicated that this was an indication that the drive
was not ready (?). I then used the boot disk, and RedHat booted, except
for a DriveStatusError BadCRC warning. Another search of the net
indicated that this could be due to a bad IDE cable - I changed the
cable and the BadCRC error went - but I still got the LILO boot time error.

I thought that if there was something wrong with the IDE cable that
maybe the installation was bad and so reinstalled RedHat over the top of
the old one - again accepting all the defaults except LILO. I still got
the same "L AA AA AA" message from LILO at boot.

I reinstalled yet again, this time using GRUB as the bootloader. This
time I got a GRUB Read Error - again searching the net indicated an
error with the drive. I could still boot RedHat with the bootdisk, and
since I had done all these installations, I thought that maybe there was
some corruption from the first installation, so I tried to reformat the
drive. I followed the example on formatting the drive in the man pages,
but stupidly I forgot that I wanted the format the Linux (hdc) drive,
instead I formatted the Windows (hda) drive!!!

Is there anyway of getting back the data on my Windows drive????

Also, why can't I now access this drive from RedHat, since I formatted
it using fdisk in Linux? When I try and mount it I get a message saying
that it is not a valid filesystem.

Out of interest, what could be wrong with the RedHat installation that
neither LILO nor GRUB work properly? (But my most important question is
how to recover my Windows drive!!)

Many thanks in advance to anyone who can provide some assistance.

Regards,
Paul Medwell

Paul Medwell wrote:
>
> Is there anyway of getting back the data on my Windows drive????

If you formatted the drive, about the only way I know of would be
expensive to have done by a professional data recovery service.

> Also, why can't I now access this drive from RedHat, since I formatted
> it using fdisk in Linux? When I try and mount it I get a message saying
> that it is not a valid filesystem.

Because "fdisk" doesn't format the disk. It is a partitioning
tool. You can format the partitions during the installation.

> Out of interest, what could be wrong with the RedHat installation that
> neither LILO nor GRUB work properly? (But my most important question is
> how to recover my Windows drive!!)

When you ran "lilo -v" after booting with into rescue mode did it
show any error message?
If it did what did it say?
What does your /etc/lilo.conf file look like?

--
Confucius: He who play in root, eventually kill tree.
Registered with The Linux Counter. http://counter.li.org/
Slackware 9.1.0 Kernel 2.4.22 SMP i686 (GCC) 3.3.2
Uptime: 7:55, 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.08, 0.26

Thanks for your reply.

It seems that I'm going to have to re-install Windows and all my
programmes

Running "lilo -v" didn't show any error messages, it seemed fine (in
comparison to working lilo I have on other machines).
I can't give you my lilo.conf because I have since installed Windows
over Linux - I needed a working Windows, and in case there is any hope
of recovering my old Windows disk, I do not want to overwrite it.

--
David wrote:
>> Out of interest, what could be wrong with the RedHat installation that
>> neither LILO nor GRUB work properly? (But my most important question
>> is how to recover my Windows drive!!)
>
>
> When you ran "lilo -v" after booting with into rescue mode did it show
> any error message?
> If it did what did it say?
> What does your /etc/lilo.conf file look like?

On Sun, 16 Nov 2003 06:01:43 GMT, David wrote:
> Paul Medwell wrote:
>> Is there anyway of getting back the data on my Windows drive????
>
> If you formatted the drive, about the only way I know of would be
> expensive to have done by a professional data recovery service.

Since he only deleted the partition, there is definetely hope. I've
never used it before, but GNU parted claims to be able to do what the OP
needs:

http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/m...d_2.html#SEC24

Good luck!

--
When you are right, you cannot be too radical; When you are wrong,
you cannot be too conservative. -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

On Sun, 16 Nov 2003 22:31:07 +0000, P. Medwell wrote:

> I have since installed Windows
> over Linux - I needed a working Windows, and in case there is any hope
> of recovering my old Windows disk, I do not want to overwrite it.
>
Since you've already installed Win98 on the other drive, Ontrack Easy
Recovery is the best recovery program I've found that runs on windows.
You can download a trial version, that only runs once, so do the whole
partition that your trying to recover files from, the first time. The link
below is to the download page.

http://www.ontrack.com/freesoftware/

--
imotgm