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attn: jaclaz or anyone who can help - windows wont boot - takes me to grub


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#1 deeper

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Posted 16 March 2008 - 12:55 PM

Heya, the reason I included your name in the post was because I google searched my problem and came across this previous thread:
http://www.boot-land....php?t3833.html

Basically I installed a copy of windows vista onto a new SATA drive to dual boot with my IDE drive which has Windows XP 64bit edition. It worked for a few days until I bluescreened in windows 64 bit and I reset my machine and chkdsk ran. I then went into windows and my login profile was lost. I spent a day rebuilding it only to get another bluescreen. After rebooting this time it failed at the boot menu.

It attempts to load Vista boot manager first and fails, redirecting to attempt to load windows NT/2000/XP and fails. Following this it loads Grub4dos.

Details as follows:

Booting 'Windows Vista'
acpi
Vista Loader 2.1.2
Done!
fallback 1
find --set-root /bootmgr

{this hangs for approximately 3 minutes then the following attempt occurs:}

Error 17: File not found
Booting 'Windows NT/2000/XP'

fallback 2
find --set-root /ntldr

{this hangs for approximately 2 minutes then the following occurs:}

Error 17: File not found
Booting 'Enter Command Line'

Boot failed! Press any key to enter command line.

======================================

Ok so going about the information I read where you helped mandie, I obtain the following result:

root (hd
{pressed tab}
Possible disks are: hd0 hd1

root (hd0
{pressed tab}
Possible partitions are:
Partition num: 0, Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7
Partition num: 4, Filesystem type is ntfs, partition type 0x7

root (hd1
{pressed tab}
root (hd1,0) <--- indicating that the drive is not partitioned or has a single partitition - whatever is more appropriate to describe it =p
{pressed enter}
Filesystem type is ntfs, partition type 0x7

Ok so so far that makes sense (I think) except for hd0,0 showing up as an uknown filesystem.
The machine had an IDE drive plugged into the secondary channel. There is only one IDE slot on my motherboard. This drive is partitioned and labelled as c: and d: . C: is my windows XP 64 bit edition, D: contained my backups.

Drive F: was labelled as my windows vista drive which is the SATA drive and recognised as hd1,0 in grub4dos.

Following on from this, I typed the following:

root (hd0,0)
{press enter}
Error 19: Cannot mount selected partition

root (hd0,4)
{press enter}
Filesystem type is ntfs, partition type 0x7

find /
{press TAB}
This lists the directory contents of which no boot files can be found (which makes sense, as this is my d: and the files listed confirm this)

root (hd1,0)
{press enter}
Filesystem type is ntfs, partition type 0x7

find /
{press TAB}
This lists the directory contents of which no boot files can be found (this is my windows vista drive, so the files *should* theoretically be there, but I guess not which is why it's not loading)

attempting to type:
root (hd0,0)
{press enter}
result in the following error:
Error 19: Cannot mount selected partition

I assume this is because it is failing to recognise the partition as NTFS even though it is/was.

I then tried:
parttype (hd0,0) 07
and:
geometry (hd0,0)
{press TAB}
Partition num: 0, Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7
Partition num: 4, Filesystem type is ntfs, partition type 0x7

So that's where I am at the moment.

Some other things worth mentioning are:
- I have no DVD or CDrom drive (broken)
- I have no floppy disk drive (ditched years ago =p)
- I setup windows vista to have the option of bringing up it's boot menu but having old windows highlighted as default.

If there's any other information I can provide to help troubleshoot this problem please let me know. It's 11pm in Australia and I only have use of this laptop until the morning to troubleshoot my machines problem.

Thanks heaps

#2 deeper

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Posted 16 March 2008 - 02:12 PM

Ok due to my impatience at attempting to get it working myself I believe I have made the problem irrecoverable.

I attempted:
parttype (hd0,0) 6

There was no result from this, it didn't recognise the drive as Fat16 nor did it as NTFS at parttype (hd0,0) 7.

I jumped to conclusions and attempted parttype (hd0,0) 5 thinking it was FAT32 and now it doesn't even get to the grub menu on reboot =P

I personally didn't install Windows XP 64bit edition so I was unsure what format it might of originally been in (and I was unsure whether you could format different filesystems for different partitions).

Ahhh computers ~

#3 was_jaclaz

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Posted 16 March 2008 - 05:38 PM

Though it may be late to recover, it should still be possible, but you need some way to boot the machine from external media, say a USB stick.

More or less what happened (I presume) is that you have a corrupt NTFS filesystem on (hd0,0).

This should be fixable, once you have restored it's partition type to 07, by booting a Recovery Console and running CHKDSK against the drive. :)

The Vista bootmanager may have been anyhow deleted/corrupted.

If you have no way to boot alternatively the machine, your only way out is to take the first (IDE) drive and connect it to another working PC, possibly directly (i.e. through the ATA/ATAPI/IDE connector) or even through one of those external USB adapters/cases.

Let me know if you can do anything of the above and I'll try and help you.

jaclaz

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Posted 18 March 2008 - 02:33 AM

Ok so I'm around a mates place now. I borrowed his CD rom drive and installed Windows XP 32bit onto my SATA drive. Windows setup only recognised the second partition on my IDE drive, so I opted to format and install on the SATA.

When I boot into windows and attempt to click on that second partition of my IDE drive Windows says the drive needs to be formatted.

I'm hoping it might be possible to get into grub4dos again (not sure how, I only got into it before because windows boot loader failed) and change the parttype back to 7 on the first IDE partition. The data on the IDE drive second partition I cannot afford to lose. I also need access to it because it has things like my network drivers etc on it.

#5 deeper

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Posted 18 March 2008 - 06:30 AM

Ok, after some driver issues with XP I've installed 32 bit Vista instead.

It still detects the IDE drive but unfortunately offers the same thing - format as the only option.

I believe what I need to do is get into Grub4DOS again somehow to modify the parttype of my IDE drive to 7. Unfortunately I believe last time that even Grub4DOS didn't recognise this after I stuffed up and did parttype 5 (this was only on the first partition).

I downloaded all 3 Grub4Dos install files and I've been looking through the readme's but unfortunately I'm too slow to follow it.

Is it possible to help me get grub4dos working again (I'm not even sure how or why it was on there in the first place originally =p) or alternately to 'force' the IDE drive to be running parttype 7 and hope that it will from there be rectified? The data on the second partition of this IDE drive is EXTREMELY important to me.

Thanks

#6 was_jaclaz

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Posted 18 March 2008 - 09:54 AM

For the moment FORGET about grub4dos. :thumbsup:

Main point is to recover the Partition.

Rather obviously, Vista is the worst possible environment to do recovery work, but we can anyway try, in my opinion Vista is the worst possible environment. that was a "period".

You need to run Testdisk:
http://www.cgsecurit...g/wiki/TestDisk
(which I cannot say if it would work under Vista)

And try to recover partition data.

Then, you need to run CHKDSK against the partition.

Try first CHKDSK, then CHKDSK /F, then CHKDSK /R.

If the above does not work, you will need to use PHOTOREC or another similar filerecovery program to salvage at least the files from the "dead" partition.

Once you have fixed the partition, will see about the grub4dos.

jaclaz

#7 deeper

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Posted 18 March 2008 - 01:44 PM

heya,


In windows disk management the filetype is listed as "RAW" (as oppossed to NTFS). My friend found a program called "R-Studio" which can definetly recover the files. The demo version allows for only minimal file recovery however; and to purchase a license for the program is around $80US which I cannot afford. However the demo shows that all files and folders are intact.

I've run teskdisk (had to choose the "as administrator" option for anything other than my CDRom to show up). It finds the appropriate sizes for the partitions but I'm unsure of what to run through with it to restore it to be readable in windows. There is an option to modify the geometry but I'm unsure if I should be touching that.

Please advise, thanks for the help so far - it's on the way to being recovered I believe =)

I chose the option to analyse the disk and it found both partitions on my IDE drive; also labelled correctly as they originally were. I'm kind of unsure from here.

#8 was_jaclaz

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Posted 18 March 2008 - 02:30 PM

If TESTDISK found properly your partitions, trust it :thumbsup:.

Once Testdisk shows the correct values, you need to tell it to WRITE those.

Read attentively the examples:
http://www.cgsecurit...sk_Step_By_Step
http://www.cgsecurit...unning_TestDisk
http://www.cgsecurit...ki/Menu_Analyse
http://www.cgsecurit...covery_Examples

It should be fairly simple, since there is no need for manual corrections.

You just highlight "Write" and press [ENTER].

There is NO need to use R-STUDIO, as said even if Testdisk fails you can use PHOTOREC or ScroungeNTFS:
http://memberwebs.co...tware/scrounge/
to recover the files.

jaclaz

#9 deeper

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Posted 18 March 2008 - 03:14 PM

Ok I've done as you said and it told me I'd need to reboot and I pressed enter for [ Ok ]

I then restarted using the shutdown menu - the PC has rebooted and is currently running chkdsk.

It's been going through for about 10 minutes now saying:

Deleting orphan file record segment xxxxxx (where the x's obviously indicate a number).

Does this seem correct? I'm scared it's deleting all my files =p

#10 was_jaclaz

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Posted 18 March 2008 - 03:44 PM

Well, that is what CHKDSK is supposed to do.

It should not create problems, those are normally errors in the filesystem.

Wait until it finishes, even if CHKDSK changes some filesystem structures, files will be there anyway.

DO NOT, and I mean DO NOT DEFRAG that hard disk.

jaclaz

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Posted 18 March 2008 - 04:20 PM

Yep all good - after it ran through what I said above it then started saying "restoring" and listing filenames. All of my second partition on the IDE drive is restored.

I guess now I just repeat the process for the first partition to have it restored also - but in the meantime I'm making duplicates of my important files on the SATA drive.

Thanks heaps for the help.

#12 deeper

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Posted 18 March 2008 - 04:37 PM

Ok so this time I rebooted to run chkdsk again and it says "corrupt master file table - ____ aborting"

In windows my SATA drive is fine, my IDE drive second partition is fine but the first partition is still 'lost'.

It shows up as 0 of 0 bytes and when you double click on it, it says:

The wrong diskette is in the drive
Insert correct diskette into drive D:\

hehe =P how can i recover this lost space? :thumbsup: I'll keep fiddling I guess =p

#13 was_jaclaz

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Posted 18 March 2008 - 04:39 PM

Yes, try running TESTDISK again on that partition, and report if you have doubts

When (hopefully) you'll have recovered also the other partition, you can either:
1) STOP playing with partition modifying software if you are not sure about what you are doing

2) CONTINUE learning how to fix corrupted filesystems and, in due time, you will be allowed to wear one of these T-Shirts:
http://www.forensicf...m...opic&t=2222

:thumbsup:

:tabletalk:

jaclaz




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