Who wants to hate on M$ with me?

guero61 · l33t Joined: 14 Oct 2002 Posts: 811 Location: Behind you

Actually, I'd rather not, I just rather desperately need some help.

Short story:
-- spend weekend installing 1.3 with XFS, left 7.5G and an open primary partition for M$ at the head of the disk (gee, am I nice or what?)

-- boot M$ (XP Pro) cd, reach partition selection, shows primaries 2,3,4 as c:,f:,g:
-----> won't make partition in primary 1, says 4 primaries already exist

-- reboot to Gentoo, get kernel panic saying root partition does not exist

-- reboot to Gentoo rescue/install, fdisk tells me that all three primaries' fs type has beeen changed to either Amoeba or "95" (unknown). Sublying logical partions are gone as well, of course

-- I had the presence of mind during install to write down my inodes, simply restored the partition table

-- XFS partions (/ and /usr) still don't mount; error:
XFS: bad magic number
XFS: SB validate failed

-- xfs_restore does nothing

Is there any possible way to recover, or did I just waste 48 hours and a good bit of data? Evidently, just letting M$ look at my partition tables says they can modify them however the hell they want.

rommel · Posted: Mon Oct 14, 2002 3:31 am Post subject:

i think you should have installed XP first..then installed gentoo and configured grub to boot either M$ or Gentoo...i dual boot with win2k and thats the way i did it and havent had any trouble, also you might want to use fat on a partition that both gentoo and xp can write to and read from.

you might try to salvage your intstall by booting from the gentoo cd and getting into your install that way...then re-install grub and possibly re-emerge the gentoo-sources and reinstall your kernel

guero61 · l33t Joined: 14 Oct 2002 Posts: 811 Location: Behind you

How exactly did you get the title "l33t"? Your post was absolutely usleless, a waste of bandwidth, as this is soon to become. If I'm installing Gentoo with XFS and have already debugged most of the problem, you might deduce I know a little about what I'm doing.

Yes, Windows before Linux is nice, but sometimes when installing over FAT32, WXP likes to grab two primary partitions, one type 0xf and one 0xc (Win'95 ext and W'95). I installed Gentoo first to force WXP to an acceptable number of primary partitions. If you read my post, I got a kernel panic, that means grub was non-problematic. The problem is that the already formatted XFS partitions will not mount. I had also already booted into the "Gentoo rescue/install disk", so that all pretty much just nullifies your entire post. Did you read anything I said?

Interestingly enough, ever since I've used Linux ('99), I've been using shared partitions between the OS's... novel idea, that.

Incidentally, I've discovered why this happened. The M$ OEM boot installer, at least, assumes all partition types are of type 0x0 (empty) and adds on 0xf to get Win'95 ext. The problem comes when you have a partition of type 0x83 (Linux) or 0x85(Linux extended) and they get converted to 0x93 (Amoeba) and 0x95 (unknown). Is it lazy or malicious coding? How can you assume a partition is of type 0x0? Of course, their bootloader is dumb enough it doesn't even like booting from a secondary disk.

So I repeat my original question: Does anyone have any clue as to how to regenerate the magic number for an SGI-XFS partition, or do I have to go back to reinstalling? (I have a feeling they're generated from the contents of the partition rather than the inodes and such, so I may very well be completely out of luck).

rac · Posted: Mon Oct 14, 2002 4:32 am Post subject:

guero61, let's say someone walked up to you on the street and asked you whether there was a restaurant around somewhere where you could get some lunch. They told you they were really hungry and desperate.

You told them of a place where you had eaten several times, and described the food and drew a little map for them.

They then insulted your taste, called you a complete idiot for ever patronizing that restaurant, and said with a visible sneer that since they knew how to pronounce the word "restaurant" correctly that you should have deduced that they were a world-famous newspaper food critic.

Would you think that people who overheard that exchange would be:

(A) More likely to help the person find somewhere to eat?
(B) Less likely to help the person find somewhere to eat?

I realize that you're probably frustrated, but as you read over your words, do you think it was necessary to tee off on rommel like that? He was trying to help you. Why alienate people? And it's not just rommel - everybody that reads this thread will form an opinion of you, and I doubt it's one that you would want people to form.
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guero61 · l33t Joined: 14 Oct 2002 Posts: 811 Location: Behind you

How did I know I was going to get modded?

Indeed; I didn't have to tee off on him. I just get tired of folks on BB's that try to answer a question without reading it and understanding it.

I would have expected a little more vested reading instead of a "skim-and-fire". Of course, in hindsight, I should expect no less (no offense intended) from BB's; I've done the same myself.

As yet uncrecalcitrant, I will say this -- the chicken-or-egg question of windows or linux first is a judgement call -- whether or not you want to corral Windows. And yes, shared partitions are a good idea -- that's why I'm doing XP over FAT32 so I can VMWare and wine programs without worrying about NTFS support in Linux.

rommel · Posted: Mon Oct 14, 2002 4:48 am Post subject:

rac · Posted: Mon Oct 14, 2002 5:04 am Post subject:

guero61 · l33t Joined: 14 Oct 2002 Posts: 811 Location: Behind you

arkane · l33t Joined: 30 Apr 2002 Posts: 918 Location: Phoenix, AZ

About the only way I know of fixing magic number issues is with the program you were talking about. (xfs_restore, and I'm sure there are other xfs repair applications). Would Parted do anything with xfs at all? I thought that was primarily a partition scheming application. Though it sounds to me like the partition table was manipulated somewhere along the line by either Windows or Linux being confused at some point. (never had it happen to me, but thats what it sounds like)

I know it's all been fixed, but I wanted to post to get a post-mortem analysis so to speak

rommel · Posted: Mon Oct 14, 2002 2:46 pm Post subject:

kind of ironic that an idiot such as myself could have a dual booting system running with now problems at all for 2 months now...lol

thanks rac for watching my back but guero was right even if not terribly subtle, i was tired and didnt read the post carefully.

so guero did you find a solution to your problem?

as for the itle 'l33t' , i had nothing to say about it...lol...i dont even know what it stands for, but i can shoe a horse...lol

guero61 · l33t Joined: 14 Oct 2002 Posts: 811 Location: Behind you

My apologies. I've cooled down now. This is the second time in a week M$ stuff has ruined my installs/data.

I have yet to find a way to regenerate the numbers, and I don't think I will. Even if I did, there would be the problem of actually modifying the magic number (where?) and so on. I've given up hope of recovering, and am now just going to go to 1.4_rc1 and forget about it.

I understand about the title; it's a thing BB's do. Over on granturismo.com, I'm a veteran, but am nowhere near the level of most of the guys over there.

If I figure anything else out, I'll be sure to post it here for posterity.

metalhedd · Posted: Mon Oct 14, 2002 5:08 pm Post subject:

I've done TONS of installs of both win2k and Gentoo on the same system. sometimes win2k first, sometimes gentoo, always works perfectly for me, mind you I never used XFS, maybe XFS Just isn't worth the hassles?

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

I think the problem is with XP, not so much Windows in general. I've read other threads where WinXP was particularly unwilling to play nicely with non-MS partitions/drives.
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dreamer3 · Guru Joined: 24 Sep 2002 Posts: 553

I realize it's probably not feasable or it would have been done already, but I bet WindowsXP would cause fewer problems if it wasn't installed ;-)

In an ironic reversal, my WinXP partition died due to data corruption a few days after I started using Linux (I did read data from it using the READ only NTFS driver, but no writing).

Of course I wasn't too ticked off as I've been meaning to get away from MS Windoze for a LONG time...

TheCoop · Posted: Fri Oct 18, 2002 7:18 am Post subject:

KiTaSuMbA · Guru Joined: 28 Jun 2002 Posts: 430 Location: Naples Italy

More bad referencies for WinXP:
My flatmate had a dual boot win98 / slack box. Despite my urges he decided to upgrade to winXP... Well, the upgrade installation not only overwrited as usually the lilo MBR entry (which is no more than a little annoiance to fix with a bootable linux floppy/cdrom) but completely crapped out the ext2 partitions. Windows reffered as free space the entire disk though they couldn't use it for it still was in ext2... Partition Magick to the salvation (but he recovered them formatting in vfat - some people lack persistence! argh!!).
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dreamer3 · Guru Joined: 24 Sep 2002 Posts: 553

More reasons to just use Wine or VMWare and friends...

cole · n00b Joined: 30 Sep 2002 Posts: 20

Here here!

Windows free since July!
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Lovechild · Posted: Fri Oct 18, 2002 5:38 pm Post subject:

Windows free since 18th of June 1999.

iancurtis · Posted: Fri Oct 18, 2002 6:17 pm Post subject:

i'll piss on windblows

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Sorry guero61, but this is going nowhere fast. If you're still needing help, a new thread with a more 'help' oriented title might turn out better.
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