Re: [Linux-NTFS-User] Making XP boot again...

[Szakacsits S. <sz...@si...>]

On Fri, 6 Oct 2006, Joachim Breitner wrote:
> thanks for the explanations, I hope they will help.
> 
> Am Freitag, den 06.10.2006, 13:38 +0200 schrieb Szakacsits Szabolcs:
> > Maybe this fixes your problem:
> > 
> > 	sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread -H240 /dev/hda
> > 
> > The head value could be 255 or something else, it depends on your BIOS, BIOS
> > disk access mode settings and your hardware. The fix must be really
> > extremely simple, just writing a few bytes to the rigth places.
> 
> I will try that. I just found out that copying the MBR from another,
> identical, untouched machine fixes the problems and lets me boot again
> (even tough the volume is smaller than the parition) so it is not a
> partition problem

If you copy the first 512 bytes of the disk then that contains the partition
table as well, so you basically fix you broken partition table. That's why
the volume is smaller than the partition. There is no magic here, everything
works as expected.
 
> > If you can't get further I suggest save a working and a non-working
> > partition table and compare them byte-by-byte. The partition table format is
> > very simple, it's only 64 bytes but you won't need to check more than a few.
> 
> Maybe that's the only way to go :-( 

Yes, and please explain it to the partitioner developers too, so they may
try to fix it (which should be fairly easy).

> What's a good on-disk hexeditor on linux? I only know xxd to dump stuff
> in hex...

Whatever your distro provides :-) Try e.g. hexedit.

	Szaka