Hi all, Please read this carefully. Don't take offense, I'm not insinuating that you wouldn't. It's just that I don't want to get myself into more of a pickle than I'm in! ;-(
This morning as I was getting my son off to work, he got me upset about something and I walked over to my laptop and instead of hitting the 'On' button, I accidentally hit the 'Media Direct' button. (I'm explaining the why so you won't thing that I'm a total airhead!). The laptop is a Dell XPS M1710. The Dell Media Direct Splash screen display, but of course, did nothing else 'cause there is only Linux on the laptop. Anyway, this corrupted my boot partition, but I was able to fix that. I just deleted the partition that hitting the 'Media Direct' button made. It put this at the end of the hard drive, but it was made the bootable partition and had a DOS/Windows partition type. I deleted the partition that hitting the 'Media Direct' button had made, then recreated a new Linux partition with an ext2 file system and made this bootable where the original boot partition had been. Then, I followed the Gentoo Handbook, doing all the relevant steps except for downloading software that was already there. I chroot'd into my environment to install grub - I did all the relevant steps including chrooting into my own environment. In my chroot'd environment, I can do an 'ls' and it reads the drives. I can also edit files like grub.conf and fstab, so there isn't a problem with my remaining partitions after reconfiguring the boot partition. I reinstalled grub, created grub.conf and ran grub-install and that was successful. However, when I reboot, I get a garbled screen, but I *can* make out the text, although barely. It goes through the boot process and gets to the point where 'Activating mdev' is displayed Then, the following is displayed: Determining root device Block dev sda3 is not a valid root device The root block device is unspecified or not detected. Of note and I'm not sure if this is where the problem is, is that when I was mounting my partitions prior to chroot'ing into my own environment, I got a message about maximal mount count and it told me I should run e2fsck. I tried this and got an error message. However, my hard drive is not ext2, it is ext3. I apologize for the length of this, but I wanted to try to explain everything. I'm having fits here - I'm writing from my old 686 computer which did have all my files on it. However, I ftp'd them to my webspace and then back down to the laptop. When I did that, I deleted most of them off the 686 and as luck would have it I didn't do a recent backup from the laptop. I do have an older backup, but would lose some recent files if I can't get my laptop up and running without a reinstall. Thanks in advance for your help. Regards, Colleen -- Registered Linux User #411143 with the Linux Counter, http://counter.li.org -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
