Neither windows nor linux will load anymore

[moof]

FIrst posting to this group, though your help to now has been invaluable

 

I have my laptop (sony vaio v505ax) set up with win xp (chinese language professional edition) on the first partition (ntfs), mac osx 10.4.1 from deadmoo image on partition two, then mandrake linux 10.1 on the third partition. System is started with LILO.

 

Extended partitions are variously: one fat32 shared disk (between os's, not networked), linux swap file, and another small ntfs partition. Deadmoo was installed from linux and ran with no problems. Network (where I'm typing now), sound, video, printing, usb, etc... all worked fine

 

 

Until...

 

Printing from osx when the battery died.

 

Windows will no longer boot. Linux will no longer boot. when I try windows, it gives me a blue screen for so short a time that I'm unable to read the error codes. It then restarts the system and I'm back at LILO.

 

Linux gives something about being unable to do [much of anything] because the system cannot be remounted read-write. It once told me to run fcsk manually, but I have been unable to do that.

 

Strange thing is this (ok, one strange thing is this) I can no longer boot from cd either. LILO loads S L O W L Y, as does osx (which used to be quide snappy to load).

 

OSX still can access all of the extended partitions, but gives a message about 'the disk I inserted is unreadable on this system' and prompts me to ignore or eject the disk. I clicked eject.

 

Please help. I just bought a new HD to back up everything onto...yesterday... a half an hour before it crashed.

 

All I really want is to save my data off the first winxp (ntfs) partition. Any suggestions?

 

Much appreciated,

[Phreakster]

I can see where that may be a problem.

 

What programs were running in OS X when it crashed? I presume a program (not neccesarily one you had opened up) was editting/accessing the drive and when the battery died parts of it were damaged.

 

That would seem to be obvious. Can we have a little more detail on the problem (eg what was running, what you were doing, any editting to the way the system boots etc)?

[Colonel]

BSOD! I'm sorry, I just hate Windows

[planetbeing]

It sounds to me like there's something funky with the hard drive and how it's paritioned and stuff. Probably some critical portions of your hard disk got corrupted when your battery died. The first thing you should do is try to get at your data on the NTFS partition, especially in case there's a physical problem.

 

Have you tried mounting the NTFS volume in OS X? You'll have to figure out what device it is, but you can probably figure that out by process of elimination. And then:

 

sudo mkdir /mnt

sudo mount_ntfs <device> /mnt

 

Device will be something like disk0s1, the number after s denoting some partition number, starting with the first one on the disk. mount_ntfs only mounts NTFS partitions read-only, so you don't have to worry about further damaging the parition (unless there's a physical problem on your disk).

 

You can then browse to the /mnt folder and copy everything out of there. The next step will be to try to figure out some way to boot from a CD, so chkdsk can be run on the Windows partition.

 

To be fair, I don't see how any of this is Window's fault. He was running with an unsupported operating system (OS X) when it crashed, which caused a problem that also knocked out Linux.