Yesterday, when I turned the computer on, it went directly into GRUB shell which allowed me to execute some commands with no real use to me.
Obviously something was wrong, and I though that it was the Master Boot Record (MBR) that got corrupted, as I've already have experienced before.
So I got the openSUSE installation disk and boot with it in order to fix the problem. I've requested the fix option from the menu but then something weird happened.
When scanning the hard disk, it displayed a message that there was something wrong and I would not be able to edit the disk partitions. I checked the partitions and the information seems to show that everything was OK.
I needed something else to see what was wrong with the hard disk and to fix it.
I grabbed an old Knoppix CD, version 3.3, the only one that I know that loads correctly on my Acer laptop (by the way, don't by an Accer if you wish to have Linux on a laptop), and checked the disks. This is not the first time I use Knoppix to save a system, it's actually one of my companion disks.
Knoppix automatically mounted both windows partitions correctly but the Linux EXT4 and Swap partitions were missing.
Now I start to get worried...
I got into a shell and checked the partitions with fdisk.
I detected the problem immediately: I had two partitions starting at the same cylinder! I even recall its number, 2086.
The second partition had an Id of f, which is awkward since the Id is a numeric value, and was marked as the boot partition. Using fdisk to see what my chances were of correcting this I realized that a drastic solution would probably be the only solution. When I deleted that second weird partition, the following partitions were gone to.
So, before I do something that I could regret latter, I checked the content of the Windows partitions to find out that if anything would go wrong I already had a backup of everything.
The data on the Linux partition seemed already lost, so I would have to settle for the backups.
On the other hand, I was still able to save everything from the Windows partitions, but that would be unecessary.
I finally decided what to do and how to do it.
I've deleted that second weird partition, defined the first partition as boot and saved the partition table.
I could have tried to recreate the partition table with fdisk, but since I had backups of everything, I just went for the full disaster scenario.
I then rebooted with the openSUSE installation disk, created a second partition, that I reserved to replace the lost second partition for Windows, and created a third one for Linux, where I installed openSUSE.
When openSUSE installation finished I've reboot and started Windows, which loaded just fine from the saved first partition. When Windows loaded, it was time to format that previous reserved second partition as NTFS.
The whole thing took me a couple of hours but I got both Windows and openSUSE up and running again. Today I'll restore the backups, which will probably take a couple hours more.
Moral of the story:
- Always have a Knoppix disk at hand.
- Backups are a tech best friend.
./M6
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