[techtalk] HELP! Recovering MBR for dual boot system..

[Conor Daly]

On Fri, Aug 25, 2000 at 01:11:11PM -0700 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Michelle Sims thought:
> Hi All,
> 	I'm here at a clients ste trying to get a system dual
> booting...
> 
> 	They had already installed RH 6.1 on the first SCSI
> drive (/dev/sda), and WIN98 (/dev/sdb) on the second
> drive.  lilo wasn't working, so they have been using
> the adaptec scsi utility to switch between boot
> drives.  
> 
> 	In my attempts to move things around I messed up both
> MBR...I fixed the linux one, but am stuck on fixing
> the windows disk.  booting from win98 boot disk and
> running FDISK /MBR returns "no fixed disks".

Does the Windows boot disk see the drive at all?  Can you do a "dir C:" on
the commandline?  If not, you may not have the correct scsi driver on the
Windows floppy.  You could boot into Linux, mount /dev/hdb and have a look
for the relevant drivers, copy them to a (manually made) boot floppy and
edit the config.sys and autoexec.bat accordingly.  
 
> 	If anyone knows how to rewrite the MBR on the windows
> disk, it would help greatly...also is it possible for
> lilo to work in this configuration?

You could try a "sys C:" from the boot floppy but I suspect that will give
the same error as the "fdisk /MBR".  The last (usual) resort is to
reinstall Windows (having first used the scsi switch to make /dev/hdb the
default drive, perhaps even disconnect the Linux drive for safety).  That
should rewrite the MBR and is (usually) conservative in its setting up
(All of the Windows settings should remain intact). 

-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)