PC help needed from the Hive mind

mudcow007

when "stuff" is deleted on the computer its not actually removed. its just flagged as "re-writable" hence why you can recover data

you have to try an recover as soon as poss though as the longer you leave data deleted the more chance you have of it being "over-written"

if you ever want to delete stuff permanently delete it, then frag the drive then write loads of data to the disk

gtvlusso

davis wrote:

dhope is pretty much correct. JW is off the mark (sorry dude).

Basically, at some point, there's been a copy of Grub installed, and it was the primary bootloader for the PC, and it was working fine. Recently, part of this Grub bootloader has been overwritten (bit of an assumption) [edit]- this was probably done without your explicit knowledge by e.g. a Windows update or some virus/bootloader protection thingy, which is why you're getting the "GRUB GRUB GRUB" problem.

Now, you've got two options:

1. Repair the grub bootloader
2. Overwrite it completely with the "standard" windows bootloader.

I believe 2 can be done with the "fixmbr" command from a Windows rescue console (if such a thing exists).
I'm generally a *nix type of geek, and I'd probably look to do 1. from sysrescue or similar.

This is the way forward from Davis and ITB:

fixmbr - fix master boot record. The Grub loader has it own cli and stuff to 'mount' the disk. You can reapir grub from almost any linux disk. I suspect thast stage 1 of Grub is okay, bu the bootloader/stage 2 is knackered.

example; you can re-write the grub wstage 2 loader with the following commands:

#!/bin/sh

/usr/sbin/grub --batch >/dev/null 2>/dev/null <<EOF
setup --stage2=/boot/grub/stage2 (hd0) (hd0,4)
setup --stage2=/boot/grub/stage2 (hd1) (hd1,4)
quit
EOF

cat > /etc/grub.conf <<EOF
setup --stage2=/boot/grub/stage2 (hd0) (hd0,4)
setup --stage2=/boot/grub/stage2 (hd1) (hd1,4)
quit
EOF

**This won't work for your machine as you only have 1 disk and I don't know the device id!

But if you have a command prompt from Grub - i.e. Stage 1:

You could type:

setup --stage2=/boot/grub/stage2 (hd0)

or help!

gtvlusso

Bugger - just realized how old this thread is......

EKE_38BPM

gtvlusso wrote:

Bugger - just realized how old this thread is......

I only bumped it to update you all.

mudcow007 wrote:

when "stuff" is deleted on the computer its not actually removed. its just flagged as "re-writable" hence why you can recover data

I know, that is why I wasn't worried massively about all of the data being lost, assuming the OS is always written to the same sectors of the HD (I don't know if this is the case).

I imagine the people who Never Say Anything could probably have recovered even more data.