amilo-forum.com

Everything you need to know about Amilo and Lifebook laptops by Fujitsu

Amilo M1425 - No restore partition after Linux installation

Everything around Linux and Unix-like operating systems.

Amilo M1425 - No restore partition after Linux installation

Postby Tifereth » Mon Mar 31, 2008 6:22 pm

Hi all,

I'm new here and I'd like to take this first message as a chance to say that this forum looks very good and plenty of valuable information to me, so keep on the great work!

Coming to my personal issue, I recently installed Linux Red Hat Enterprise 3 on a different primary partition than C: (where Win XP home is installed) on my Amilo M1425. The GRUB boot loader has been installed and works properly, but since then I cannot access the Advance Boot Menu during the startup. If I press F8 repeatedly when the machine is booting up nothing happens and GRUB is loaded as normal... My question is:
Do you think that GRUB, being installed in the MBR, is preventing me to access the hidden partition?
If yes, any workaround?
If not, what may it be causing that?

To specify, I never tried to access the hidden restore partition even before installing Linux, so it can also not be related to GRUB. I don't need to restore the system now, but, in case, I'd like to be able to do it (also I never backed up to DVDs the information in the restore partition and that is something I'd like to do).

Thanks in advance for your help!
User avatar
Tifereth
 
Posts: 3
Joined: Sun Mar 30, 2008 12:59 pm
Notebook:

Postby hikaru » Tue Apr 01, 2008 9:05 am

Grub has rewritten your MBR and doesn't know anything about Windows-recovery partitions.

If you have the expertise, you can edit your MBR manually, to restore the access to your recovery partition. But you should only do that if you know exactly, what you are doing. I'm not that advanced, so I wouldn't do it. If you are, please post the steps!

There are only two chances I see:
The first is, to is to restore your old MBR from a backup, burn the Recovery-DVDs and restore your current MBR again.
But since I guess, that you don't have a backup, I see no chance to do it that way.

The second one is to get an XP-CD from a friend, and run a repair install. I'm not sure if this will restore your recovery partition but it will definitely overwrite your MBR. So backup your current one, that contains Grub with the RedHat-Entry.
Unfortunately I don't know how to integrate the recovery-entry into grub. The only way I see is to backup both MBRs and install the one that you currently need.
User avatar
hikaru
Moderator
 
Posts: 1153
Joined: Thu Oct 25, 2007 9:23 am
Notebook:
  • Amilo Si 1520
  • Desktop
  • Asus EEE 901

Postby aspettl » Tue Apr 01, 2008 12:50 pm

Tifereth, are you sure that there existed a recovery partition before?
Please post the output of
Code: Select all
sfdisk -l

(Unless you configured the setup to do it, partitions aren't deleted automatically.)

F8 only works with the Windows bootloader - which has been replaced with GRUB, that's correct. Most Linux distributions automatically add an entry "Microsoft Windows", which loads the old Windows bootloader (then F8 should work again).

Regards
Aaron
User avatar
aspettl
Site Admin
 
Posts: 1347
Joined: Sat Mar 25, 2006 3:31 pm
Location: Germany
Notebook:
  • Lifebook E8020D

Postby hikaru » Tue Apr 01, 2008 1:18 pm

@aspettl:
It seems like the access to the recovery partition depends on the existence of a corresponding MBR-entry.
I doubt whether Grub is able to provide this entry since neither EasyBCD nor the Vista repair installation seems to be able to do that.

Please refer to this thread in the german forum:
http://www.amilo-forum.de/topic,22130,-kann-auf-recovery-partition-nicht-mehr-zugreifen-hilfe.html
User avatar
hikaru
Moderator
 
Posts: 1153
Joined: Thu Oct 25, 2007 9:23 am
Notebook:
  • Amilo Si 1520
  • Desktop
  • Asus EEE 901

Postby Tifereth » Tue Apr 01, 2008 1:58 pm

hikaru and aspettl thank you very much for your responses, much appreciated. :)

@hikaru
I think I wouldn't feel confident enough to edit the MRB manually at the moment, so I leave it for now, but if I'll ever do, I promise to post here the steps!
Thanks for your 2 suggested solutions; as you assumed correctly I didn't backup the MBR before so I think I'd go for the second plan and let you know.

@aspettl
Good question, I can't really know if there was the partition before as I never tried to access it, but I agree with you that the installation haven't deleted it (or at least it shouldn't have), so I'm pretty confident I'll be able to find a way to access it eventually.
I'll post here the output of "sfdisk -l" (before and after fixing the MBR from the Windows Repair console, although I think it shouldn't change), thanks for that.

@all
I've already tried to press F8 immediately after selecting Windows from GRUB and didn't work, so that backs what hikaru wrote in the last comment I reckon (I can't read German so my apologies if something I'm writing is already in the thread linked there).
I won't be in front of my Amilo for a couple of days, but as soon as I have access to it, I'll do my recovery and then post here as much information as possible about the steps I've followed and the output I've got.
User avatar
Tifereth
 
Posts: 3
Joined: Sun Mar 30, 2008 12:59 pm
Notebook:

Postby Tifereth » Sun Apr 06, 2008 12:45 pm

I finally managed to be in front of my laptop and try what we discussed :) ; here below you can find the steps I followed but I anticipate that I couldn't go as far as I needed (I explain the reason later in this post).

1 - I executed the command
sfdisk -l
and you can find the output attached here as the file "sfdisk-l.log" (it's a Linux text file so is much more readable if opened with wordPad instead of NotePad under Windows).
Any consideration about the output? Thanks in advance! :wink:

2 - I've saved the current MBR (as I was saying GRUB works smoothly) with the tool called MBRutil, the number 2 that you find listed in this page.

3 - I booted my machine from the Win XP CD and pressed R (Repair) to go to the Recovery Console and chose the right Windows installation (which is the only one). And guess what? I'm experiencing the error reported and described here in this page of the Microsoft Support :x . Basically the system doesn't recognize the Administrator password and so doesn't grant access to the Recovery Console, therefore I couldn't run
fixmbr

As suggested in the support page linked above, I've emailed the technical support and am still waiting for them to get back to me with the fix for that known issue. If the fix doesn't work I can still install a brand new Windows XP OS in yet another partition and that will automatically overwrite the MBR, but I prefer to wait for the technical support response and then take it from there.

I'll keep you posted, meanwhile any comment about the output of sfdisk -l will be much appreciated :wink:
Attachments
sfdisk-l.log
Log file of commands sfdisk -l, sfdisk -sl, sfdisk -s
(2.17 KiB) Downloaded 256 times
User avatar
Tifereth
 
Posts: 3
Joined: Sun Mar 30, 2008 12:59 pm
Notebook:


Return to Linux / Unix / BSD