I use both Windows 98 and Debian on my machine, using LOADLIN for dual booting; I have something of a filesystem disaster resulting from the following course of action earlier today:
1. I divided my Linux /home partition (/dev/hda9) into two Linux ext2 partitions, /dev/hda9, which I wanted to retain as a Linux /home filesystem, and /dev/hda10, which I wanted to hand over to Windows for a bit of extra space (having carefully backed up /dev/hda9 first like a good little Linux hack.) 2. I used cfdisk to change the type of /dev/hda10 to Windows 95 FAT32 (LBA) to match my other Windows 98 partition, /dev/hda1. All filesystems were still fine at this point. 3. I then rebooted the machine. Config.sys was read from /dev/hda1 as normal, producing my boot menu, from which I chose Windows 98. Windows, understandably, ran scandisk on /dev/hda10. On completion, it crashed out, complaining of an invalid command.com. When I tried to reboot, I found myself with an 'invalid system disk' message. 4. I booted from my Windows 98 rescue floppy, and found the root directory of C:\ (i.e. /dev/hda1) full of garbage. Lots of lovely incomprehensible filenames made up of non-ASCII symbols. The only readable object is the scandisk.log file, which mentions in passing that copy #2 of the file allocation table has been rewritten. I take all this to mean that my data are still on the disc, but the directory structure has been corrupted; any ideas on how I can restore it without having to resort to my (6 week old) backup of /dev/hda1, please? Thanks Dan Hatton (Extremely stressed about losing all my, and my Mother's, lovely multimedia files.)
