[luau] How to repair system?

[tburns at despammed.com]

> The "OS not found" part is somewhat scary.  ... 
>  I would fear hardware 
> damage or failure. =(

Me too, but it turns out that the system  booted again after I poked around with LNX-BBC for a while. I ran fsck and fdisk ineptly, not sure what I did (if anything) that fixed things. Lucky. Not sure I trust it either.

This box used to have this "os not found" problem often, until I put in a new hard disk and switched from w2k to linux. 
> 
> What you can try is to mount your partitions from a rescue disk.  Your
> Knoppix is a pretty good rescue disk, alternatively Red Hat or
> Mandrake's Disk 1 have excellent Rescue functionality too.

Knoppix only mounts things read only, and does not give you root. I was using LNX-BBC, but that also failed to mount anything from my hard drive, if I am not mistaken. Nothing I did appeared to work, but when I was trying to switch from LNX-BBC to knoppix it accidentally booted from the hard drive. Was I surprised!

> What distro was originally on the hard drive?

redhat 7.3

> What filesystem?  ext2, ext3, reiserfs, XFS, JFS, etc.

[embarrassed} not sure. Whatever the default is for redhat install, probably.

Since luau was down (for the same reason!) I sent my question to newchix, and got one page that looks helpful from them - <http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LILO-crash-rescue-HOWTO-2.html >. I wqas attempting to slog through that when my machine capitulated.

Dave

Dave