[GRLUG] Wonky old computer

Adam Tauno Williams awilliam at whitemice.org
Mon Sep 15 06:30:42 EDT 2014


On Sat, 2014-09-13 at 19:46 -0400, Eric Beversluis wrote: 
> I was checking out an old computer this morning--a dual boot setup with 
> an early Fedora and Win98 on it--I hadn't run it for 6 or so years. 
> Initially it booted up nicely to Windows (I aborted the Fedora boot when 
> my flat-screen monitor didn't like the resolution it was getting from 
> Fedora). But at some point it froze up and I had to power it down.
> Now it won't boot at all. It gets to the point of saying it's found a 
> boot at IDE 0 but then hangs. "Searching for boot record from IDE-0. .OK"
> With Knoppix I can access the old Fedora files but even Knoppix doesn't 
> see the Windows partition--it only sees /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2, the 
> Fedora and swap partitions.
> Any ideas? Did the Windows partition just somehow self-destruct?

Does the system physically have two drives?  If it has only one then
wither SDA1 or SDA2 is the Windows partition.  What does the output of
"/sbin/fdisk -l" look like?

You have a failed/failing drive most likely - no surprise for a drive
that sat idle for six years. 

-- 
Adam Tauno Williams <mailto:awilliam at whitemice.org> GPG D95ED383
Systems Administrator, Python Developer, LPI / NCLA



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