Help on crashed Hard Disk Recovery under LINUX

[gboyce at badbelly.com (Gregory Boyce)]

On Mon, 2003-08-25 at 18:47, M.V.Q. Somen wrote:
> Hi,
>   I have a deil Laptop with windows-me and 
>   redhat linux installed in it.
>  
>   Now the Boot sectors seem to have been corrupted
>   after a windows crash(protection error).
> 
>   The PC is booting neither for windows nor linux
>   now.
>   Actually under both the OS the Laptop is booting
>   half way thru and then gets stuck. 
>   Windows says protection fault but in the case
>   of Linux "boot file systems not found" error
>   is displayed.
> 
>   Is there any way to reinstall Linux
>   on the existing Linux partition without 
>   overwriting the personal data files stored
>   in the root file systems ?
> 
>   If so how to do it and what options to choose
>   during Linux installation ?
> 
>   Also if I want to create a Linux bootable
>   floppy disk from another computer running
>   Linux, what is the command to be used to
>   make the disk bootable ?
> 
>   I would greatly appreciate any suggestions
>   or help in this regard.
> 
>   Thanks in advance,
>                --Somen.

Somen,

If the linux partition itself is intact, and just the boot sector is
broken then you don't really need to reinstall linux.  If you can boot
off of a linux CD-ROM and get to a root prompt, you can reinstall grub
or lilo (whichever you used) and get your machine back up and running
again.

What distribution are you running, and what boot loader were you using? 
Depending on your distro, your install CD might be enough to allow this
to be repaired.

-- 
Gregory Boyce <gboyce at badbelly.com>