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Re: [Sheflug] Disaster?



On Mon, 2002-07-22 at 19:24, Ruth Gunstone wrote:
> My computer refused to boot tonight - complained of "Missing Operating
> System".

This means the a magic number in the MBR/partition table is wrong, IIRC.

> I've got the machine booted now, thanks to the boot floppy I made earlier.
> I'm guessing that somehow the boot sector on hda has become damaged (?). How
> do I restore it (or is it time for a new HDD?)

Could be a couple of things. Check your BIOS - it could be that the
battery on the BIOS has failed, reset to default values, and set the
geometry to something wrong. This would also manifest itself as Win98
complaining loudly, since it relies on the BIOS being able to correctly
read the disk.

If is the MBR, you can restore it by re-running lilo or grub-install
(depending which your Linux bootloader is), or by running 'fdisk /mbr'
in Win98 (warning: if you used to dual-boot, you don't really want to do
this!). 

Cheers,

Alex.

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