confused on how to find my partitions with grub

[ceeleelewis]

I am truly a newbie and I would like a little assistance in restoring my box to the way it was.

I am running Mandrake 9.2 download edtion and I'm running into a problem with grub. I thought that I had a good install of grub but when I rebooted my box, I'm sent into the grub prompt ( ie: grub> ). I just want to know one, how to show a list of my partition so I can point my root to partition. And two, how can I make sure that my dos partition will br recongnized on the next boot? Is there a way for me to change these settings while in the (grub >) mode? Thanks for the help and don't hesitate to ask me to clarify any unclear questions ... I am learning.

 

[AP81]

I take it you made a boot disk, so you are able to boot into Linux. When linux has booted and you have logged in, to list your partition information type:

fdisk -l /dev/hda
(Assuming you have installed linux on your first hard disk)

Otherwise if you have installed Linux to your second hard disk, type:

fdisk -l /dev/hdb

Next, you want to get the info from GRUB. Have a look at the contents of /boot/grub/menu.lst or /boot/grub/grub.conf

Paste this information back so we can all look at it. If you are unsure of how to do this, you can also access your linux partition through Windows. Download this program called Explore2fs at

http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm

You can then navigate to your /boot/grub/menu.lst or /boot/grub/grub.conf and export the file to a Windows directory.

 

[ceeleelewis]

Is there anyway that I can recover from this if I didn't create a boot disk? I tried to perform a virtual swap to remap my partitions and was unsuccessful in restoring because of a disk reading error... do you think I should reswap the partitions and hide the seemly corrupt partition to restore my box back to just Linux? (by the way...sorry the late response)

 

[AP81]

I can't give you advice on what exaclty to do because I am not 100% clear on what is going on. What I would be telling you is just guesses. I am also not that familiar with Mandrake.

I guess you just reinstall it again, seeing as you haven't even got it up and running. Make sure to install GRUB on the master boot record. Also, is Linux installed onto a Slave drive by any chance?

 

[enorbet]

Hello
I think the big question is what is "perform a virtual swap" and who/what determined there was a disk reading error and on what partition - linux or windows? This is all important to know but in the meantime you can use a lilo boot floppy such as the first diskette ( if you had one ) Loadlin ( from a dos prompt ) or get "Tom's Boot Disk" or even Knoppix Live CD. The diskettes should pause at one point and ask for any parameters you'd like at which point you can type "Mount root=/dev/foo" and boot mandrake ( foo being the drive and partiton where root is ). The Knoppix CD is an entire bootable Linux OS on CD. It will take you to a desktop where you can search through KDE's Control Center or Hardware Info for "Storage Devices" or "Partitions" or issue the commands such as fdisk -l foo that will show you where things are. If the Linux partition is supposedly bad, you can use "e2fsck" to verify your partition. You might also try "e2fsck -help" to get a list of switches as "-v" and "-y" iirc are often desired. Once you identify what is where and that your tables are clean, then ask some more about what you want to do from there
Jimmy