Mepis CDROM has wreaked havoc; my PC no longer finds any hard drive

My understanding is that a live CD boot does not touch the existing hard drive in any way. Did you do anything to the XP system or windows partitions from the mepis system when it was running?

He said he installed. i assume that means he installed Mepis. He needs instructions on adding windows to the grub menu and we need to know if he even gets the grub menu on boot. That may be missing as well.

So much for trying to fix Windows. But keep in mind, you were trying to fix something that you said was broken. It is not Mepis' or Linux's fault if you don't know what you are doing. Find a local geek friend to help you before you make it worse.

Brian
Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.

I certainly didn't do anything to the XP system nor to partitions (I only have one). I can't remember exactly but I may possibly have opened one or more Windows files or folders, just as part of getting the feel of things.

Funny, as you say, that a CD (read-only, at that) should affect the HD. I thought the same - but in reverse - when my XP CDROM refused to open Recovery Console because it couldn't find any HD. The logic escapes me.

I seem to have created some confusion (or maybe I'm the idiot that that village is missing). I shouldn't have said "installed" should I? I ran the live CD only.

Secondly, I didn't say that it was this PC that was the broken one. It's another PC that's broken. I was using this (my main one) to burn the CD and, having burned it, to give it a test run. Before that, this PC was working fine.

Brian,

This persons machine has crashed, and he's entirely reasonable to be looking for causes and cures. Under the circumstance described, I would wonder the same thing. I don't think he ment that he installed it to the hard drive but that he installed it from the CD, and normal live CD boot. But hopefully, we will hear from them directly ....

kosketus,

hehe .. now I am confused. Perhaps you could give it another swing. Whats the relationship between the two machines and the mepis CD?

Question ? Did you change the bios to boot from cd ? If so you might double check and see if your your bios has the hard drive listed as a bootable device in the boot order .

jim

tcranbrook

There's no relationship between the two machines (one's my desktop, in what passes for my workstation, the other's my HTPC in another room). The problem I've been trying for some time to find a fix for is in my HTPC; someone trying to help with that suggested I d'l and burn a CD of one of the Linux distros - as a means to help diagnose/fix that problem. I of course used my desktop to produce the CD. The rest you know...

james e. thompson

I'd always had the BIOS set to boot first from cd (because I don't have an a:\ drive), so I didn't have to change the order. And yes, it's still that way. Boot order is:- cd, USB FDD, c:\

I don't know what exactly happened, but I had a similar 'end-result' (seemingly NO harddisk according to my Mepis-LiveCD. Unable to use the Mepis livecd to restore grub in the mbr) with an earlier RC from Mepis. I used ANOTHER livecd (not from Mepis) to boot and write grub to the mbr again. All 11 partitions on that single harddisk then appeared again - no data lost.
You case is however different since you need to restore the MBR for Windows: First use another LiveCD to write grub to the MBR of your HD. Then use your WinXP CD again to restore the MBR.

Hope you succeed.

Regards, Ko

Not sure if I understood the issue properly, but in a similar event, my Winxp drive failed to boot after installing a test version of Mepis. (a 'beta' risk I was aware of)

Re-installing WinXP wasn't an option for me -- as the WinXP_installer would not recognize my NTFS drive. (odd???)

Consequently, I was fortunate to be able to backup my NTFS contents to DVD+R under Mepis with K3B, then re-format my HDA1 drive to fat32 with
QParted.

I then easily re-install XP onto the newly created FAT32 drive.

I had also tried to repair my XP MBR with the Ms Repair Console, but that had failed. ( it wouldn't recognize my HDA?)

In the least, I now know that if all else fails, a Live install
of Mepis can save my bacon in a bind.

I had a situation where my PC would not boot when I had the boot sequence set to CD,USB,C:. I removed USB from the list and it booted. I had no bootable USB devices attached so it should not have affected the bootup, but it did.

New stage reached. First could I say thanks for the help so readily forthcoming here.

I now have two issues. One is with Windows. I found that when I installed an ATA hard drive with a copy of XP on it plus a lot of data, made it Primary master (shifting my multi drive to Secondary master) and booted-up, the machine booted straight into WinXP, with this disk as 'Drive 0' and my SATA drive as 'Drive 1'. In that configuration WinXP has given the ATA drive letter 'C' and the SATA drive letter 'E', and both are equally accessible. So I still have all my data:-) When I restore the previous configuration, the machine won't boot into WinXP at all (as before). I must pursue this in a Windows forum.

The other issue is with Linux (but may be off-topic here - probably should go in the 'Install Mepis' forum). I also have Knoppix on a CD; both the Mepis and the Knoppix live CDs now hang during install (both having installed successfully once, but only once), and both hang at around the same position:- at or immediately after loading /etc/fstab

Or maybe - since both issues seem to connect with file allocation tables - they are in fact linked after all...?

OK, now that we get some more info, I see something to comment on. I had several similar problems with XP, but loaded on a regular ATA drive. What makes the situation similar is that I had my ATA drive hooked to a Promise ATA100 controller. I couldn't get XP to install while the drive was connected to the controller since Windows didn't have a driver for the card. Later, when I installed XP 64-bit, it now has an option to load an external driver.

What I had to do was install to the drive while hooked to the std IDE controller and then install the card and the driver, then move the drive over to the controller. How does this help you? Not sure. If all the hardware in your PC is the same as when you bought it, then the driver SHOULD be on the system restore disk that came with it along with other standard tools.

Are you able to boot to the Mepis and XP CDs? If so, you should be able boot to the XP recovery disk, to cancel out of the installer, and type "fdisk /mbr" from the command prompt. This will restore the XP boot loader to the MBR, Master boot record. Also, verify in your BIOS that you boot to the HDD after the CD. In all BIOS that I have worked with, you can see the drives listed/detected on one of the screen. Make sure your drive is listed there. It is possible that your drive died while you were doing your experiment. These things just happen sometimes.

Sorry if I was rude before,
Brian

Brian

No offence taken.

Brian:

I don't know if you've got the same problem or not. But, it's been my experience that if you have mixed drive types and install Mepis to a SATA drive, the Mepis install script will *ALWAYS* trash the MBR in a way that Windows is no longer bootable.

This may be unique to my PC (Dell 8300). See my post in this thread for what I've found fixes mine:

http://www.mepis.org/node/8775#comment-30420

Edit: URL didn't work... trying it with code tags around it. If this doesn't work, copy and paste the above URL into your address bar.

http://www.mepis.org/node/8775#comment-30420

Jim C.

Perhaps your system is having a conflict between IDE and SATA interfaces. I don't know if this is true for all SATA capable motherboards but the ones I have used will not allow you to install an IDE drive in IDE 0 along with a SATA drive in SATA slot 0. Without knowing all the details of your system it is difficult to say for certain if this is actually the problem.

In a system I have here, the configuration is the IDE with DVD+RW on IDE0 and the SATA drive on SATA 2 (actually the third) connector (0 and 1 are used by the IDE) with the BIOS set to boot the SATA HD by default. It is then a simple matter of pressing the escape key at bootup for the few times I actually need to boot from a CD. Likewise, the CD could be set as the default boot device without problems.

As an aside, it is possible to repair the MBR of a XP drive using the older DOS or Win9x boot (or recovery) floppy disks or any method where you can get to a DOS command line to run FDISK. The command would then be...

fdisk /mbr

I don't know how difficult this might be on a system without a floppy drive. I use this method all the time when testing various OS's on systems with XP Home, XP Pro and service packs 1 and 2. However, I have only tested this on drives with fixed size partitions, YMMV!

Cheers,
Mike T.

Mike:

I'm pretty sure it is a BIOS issue with my Dell. But, it doesn't make any difference how you set the drives, or what ports you use. The BIOS does not see my IDE drive (and, it's a relatively vanilla Western Digital).

It sees a CD Burner fine (regardless what connection use).

I upgraded the BIOS when I got this PC. Nope. It just does not like my drive (master or slave, doesn't make any difference what port on the MB you use). I can use the port and cables that work fine with the CD drive and it still won't work (even with the CD drive removed, the BIOS won't see it).

But, operating systems do see it fine (very strange). XP and Mepis can see it (as can other distros I've tried), even though the BIOS doesn't.

That's probably what's messing up the GRUB install from MEPIS. You don't want to have this IDE drive installed at the same time you're installing MEPIS to the SATA drive. Otherwise, it will trash your MBR for some reason where Windows can't boot.

Some of the other distros I've tried work OK with both drives in it during the install (for example Suse does fine with both and it's boot loader works OK).

With MEPIS, I just unplug it for the install to the SATA drive. It's no big deal (just an old drive I had some stuff on). I've since copied everything to the new one and will probably put the old one in another PC.

Jim C.

Not sure how much of the two previous posts I understand (please bear with me - I'm completely unfamiliar with Linux and not that clever with Windows). While I'd love to become a Linux user one day, my immediate problem is how to get my Windows box back to the way it was two days ago.

The ATA vs. SATA thing is a red herring (introduced by me). Two days ago I had only the one (SATA) drive in my machine, which was the way I built it; I've been happily running XP on that machine ever since. Now suddenly although the BIOS still sees the SATA drive the machine will no longer boot into Windows via that drive. I can't use Windows Recovery Console because it refuses to load (from the WinXP installation CD) - it just says there are no hard drives installed on my computer and aborts itself.

Is there some way to use the Mepis live CD so as to repair the MBR on the SATA hard drive, or if not is there some other workaround to enable me to boot into XP from that drive? Mepis is able to read from it and even (if I dared to use qtparted - which I don't) to create partitions on it. So can't it do anything to allow me to use it in Windows? Am I missing something that's right under my nose?

This worked for me (but, I don't know if you have the same problem):

http://www.mepis.org/node/8775#comment-30420

You can get the Ultimate Boot CD from here:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Jim C.

I'll repeat it in this thread:

Here is what I did when Windows wouldn't load:

Run Ranish Partition Manager from the Ultimate Boot CD

After you boot to the CD, you'll find Ranish under the File System Menu Choices. Make sure your NTFS partition is bootable (it wasn't after my last Mepis install before I figured out that the other drives were causing it).

I personally avoid QTParted (my experience with it has not been good, with errors/problems trying to change partions with this Dell).

Ranish doesn't understand NTFS. But, it can make the partition bootable again.

Then, go to a Windows Recovery Console (boot from your Windows CD).

Log into your Windows under recovery console (hopefully, it will find it).

Run Fixmbr (this alone may not fix the problem when you get a NTLDR not found error after a Mepis install).

Run Fixboot (sometimes this won't fix the problem either).

Make a copy of your boot.ini (copy it to bootini.old or something) just to be safe.

Run bootcfg /rebuild and make sure your Windows install is there.

Reboot and Windows will load again (at least that works for me).

If none of the above works, try installing Suse 10.0. For some reason, it managed to get Windows working again on my wife's laptop after a Mepis install wouldn't let it load Windows after some kind of "fluke" with GRUB.

Jim C.

Really good info Jim!

That's exactly what I should of done when mine became unbootable.

I never thought of using Ranish in this way. I'll surely use this method next time.

TNX!

I had a similar experiance while trying to install a newer copy of MEPIS on this laptop a few months ago. The problem occured while Grub was being written... an error reported that writing Grub had failed. It was then that I discovered a couple of serious things. First, the XP recovery CD had two ways to recover: 1) overwrite everything and lose all partitions and everything on your HD, or 2) install a second copy of XP, which would have taken a spare 5GB that the HD didn't have. Doing an "FDisk /mbr" would not work and neither could I use FDisk to explore the partitions. The XP recovery CD didn't have the HD recovery tools that previous Windows recovery CDs had.

The problem was that the logical partition which was previously marked as "Active" lost that mark and FDisk wasn't able to restore it. Thankfully, I was able to boot PCMagic 8.0's CD and run a file on it called pcboot.bat, which ran a console program which allowed me to reset the logical partition which held Windows (hda1) as the "Active" partition. Then I was able to run the PC Magic pgm which restored the mbr. That allowed XP to come up again. Then I downloaded a new copy of the same ISO, checked the md5 sum, and burned a fresh CD. The install of MEPIS using that CD went without incident and I am writing this msg from that laptop.

More than likely the problem was either a faulty ISO or a faulty burn of the MEPIS ISO.

You could be right (I've been known to be a mite hamfisted) However, I too did check the MD5 sum for the downloaded iso before I burned it. As to a faulty burn, how would I know?

Thanks JimC. This looks as if it might be just the ticket - provided I can understand how to use it and don't make any cockups.

Could you kindly first of all put me straight on one point though? Which version of UBCD should I use, basic or advanced? Left to myself I'd go for the basic (as you'll have noticed I'm anything but an advanced user) but if Ranish isn't on it then it won't serve for this purpose.

I didn't even know they had more than one version. Checking my download directory, it looks like the one I've got is 3.2 (current is 3.3). It's most surely just the basic (as I remember downloading it from one of the mirrors).

Their web site shows that the basic version of 3.3 includes Ranish.

Again, I have no idea if making the partition bootable will help with your problem or not. But, that's one of the things I did with mine.

I know very little about partitioning, and nothing at all about boot loaders, etc. So, I'm probaby not the best person to give advise. I'm just relaying what I found worked for me to get Windows working again, via trial and error.

Hi,

I'm not out of the wood yet but - unless and until it fails - I'm pursuing a strictly-Windows solution at present.

Meantime, though, I'm curious to know what people think I should do about using the Mepis live CD. *If* it is the case that using it once did cause the havoc I've reported, do I dare to use it again on the same PC (once I've - hopefully - got it running normally again)? Obviously, I now feel considerable trepidation about this. Am I right to feel that way?

I suppose it depends on how the problem I had is diagnosed, but not only can I not diagnose it myself but I doubt that I'd understand anyone else's diagnosis either However, the first thing seems to be to decide whether or not it *was* the Mepis live CD that caused the problem (if it wasn't, it was an extraordinary coincidence that I just happened to "lose" my MBR immediately after I'd run it - so I find this frankly unbelievable). Or is it possible through sheer clumsiness to cause Mepis live CD to misbehave in this way - in which case some helpful tips about "what NOT to do next time" would be much appreciated.

Beyond that, I'm all at sea. Any ideas...?

Well, looks like you're not the only one who got screwed over by MEPIS.

First some background. I had my laptop setup to dual boot windows and suse linux, using grub bootloader. Since my dad's windows computer had been rendered unbootable, I downloaded a MEPIS live cd (3.4-3). I got the bright idea to test it out on my laptop before I used it on my dad's computer. Bad idea. While everything went fine, after I logged out (without installing anything) and shut down the computer, next time I booted it up, guess what.... no operating system can be found! I guess now I'm gonna have to try to get my grub working again >_<

-=:Edit:=-
Ok, so I booted up with my suse cd, chose emergency recovery or whatever from the menu, then just shut it off once it all loaded cuz I had no idea how to go about fixing my problem from the shell. Next time I booted up my laptop, lo and behold, the grub loader loaded up and windows and linux were accessible and working normally again ^_^

Thanks Jim, this helped me out too.

I don't know at what stage my WinXP became unbootable. I was booting in and out of the MEPIS Live CD and GParted Live CD and once I got my partitions in order I installed MEPIS. I saved the MEPIS boot loader to mbr, rebooted and thought I'd see if WinXP was still OK but it failed to load.

Anyway, it was easy to fix because the info was here in the forums. I like the Ultimate Boot CD Very useful.

Cheers.

I have never had a Live-CD cause any damage to a computer that a simple reboot would not fix, don't feel bad, Linux is not for every one.
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