[lug] Norton roached my Linux partition

arnie sherman asherman1 at uswest.net
Fri May 18 20:18:18 MDT 2001


hmm, first time failed, let's see if this makes it to the
list this time.

Hi folks,
I'm really looking for some help here. I have had my
computer set up w/ 2 IDE drives. win95 on the C drive, a
win95 partition on the D drive, and C.O.L.2.0 on a
partition (ext2 & a swap partition) on that second drive. I
boot with Partition Magic 3.0 (the full commercial version).

Everything has been fine up till now. I recently was given a

copy of Norton System Works, which I installed & ran Disk
Doctor. One thing that troubled me right away is after that
I could not get the defrager to see my D drive. Everything
else appears fine from windows. I don't use Drive Space or
any other sort of compression utility.

Now when I try to boot into Linux, right after choosing my
Linux partition from the Boot Loader, I get an error that
the disk is not formatted. I started up Partition Magic &
checked out the disk, and all it shows is one large
partition with a format type listed as unknown. The
partition check returns an Error #108 - Partition Doesn't
End at End of Cylinder. It shows the 2nd drive as 0 meg in
size, and doesn't appear to see the swap, ext2 or fat32
partitions. Other than partition check, Partition Magic
doesn't give me any other options for manipulating partition

borders, formats, etc. Except for preferences, all of the
choices are all grayed out.

Needless to say, I'm kinda bummed at this. It's not a
tragedy, all of the important data is backed up, but I have
been pretty happy with the way I had Linux all set up, and
it will take a long time to reproduce that configuration. My

best guess is that the evil Dr Norton has done some terrible

thing to the MBR, but I'm just guessing. Any suggestions on
how to recover my pre-existing setup would be VERY welcome.
Thanks in advance,
sigh...
--
arnie sherman
frenomulax at bigfoot.com

"I'm only Bob Dylan when I have to be."
  - Bob Dylan





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