Hi again Greg Gregory Avedissian wrote:
There were three backups of the mbr. One made under dos with debug.exe, and the others made with linux as,
dd if=/dev/hda of=/boot/boot.MBR bs=512 count=1 dd if=/dev/hda of=/boot/boot.446.MBR bs=446 count=1
I restored with:
dd if=/boot/boot.MBR of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 I think maybe I picked the wrong one.
I admit I would have used the second, safer (since it does not touch the partition table), but I don't see why the 512 bs variant would not have worked unless you had changed the partition table since making that boot.MBR file.
also tried restoring with debug.exe, according to a long set of instructions that I could provide but not explain. Unfortunately, the only copies of the linux versions were on the hard drive, so I couldn't repeat that unless (until) I can suck the files off the lost drive.
Why don't you boot from a bootable floppy? Alternatively, start the SuSE recovery mechanism which includes "boot an installed system" as an option. If all that is screwed up it the MBR, you could then simply run LILO to refresh it.
There's a good possibility of retrieving those files, along with the data files I want, thanks to a friend.
Or see above.
And I probably won't even keep the drive as a win/linux combo, but start over again with two drives.
While I agree that's a good idea in general, it will still not prevent you blowing away something if you put your mind to it! :-)
But I'd still like to know where I went wrong and if there's a way to reverse it.
It is hard to tell what went wrong until you tell us what you were doing just before the system no longer would boot. (Those two lines creating the boot.xyz files would only read from the first 512 or 446 bytes not do any writing there so they cannot be the cause of your troubles.) Note that generally, when you are asking for help, providing your diagnosis (i.e. "I blew away the MBR") is not very helpful. Rather your should provide an objective description of what is not happening correctly, like "I can no longer boot linux" etc. The point is that, since you are in over your head (or you would not be posting a query), your diagnosis is not going to be very reliable so anyone trying to help you will need to know what your were actually doing just before the problem arose not what you think you did. They can then make their diagnosis and/or prognosis/treatment. doug