Then I ran my Windows XP install CD in recovery mode to try to fix the Master Boot Record. I ran the “fixboot” and “fixmbr” commands in the recovery console and this did nothing. The recovery console also failed to find Windows on the hard drive and suggested that the filesystem on the drive was corrupted. Needless to say, I was becoming frantic (panicking would be putting it mildly) because I had not backed up many of my important files in quite some time.

After much searching around, I found the following post in Debian Administration. The scandisk tool repaired what I think may have been a corrupted partition table. I was then able to run the windows recovery console again to fix the master boot record and the windows drive was able to boot on its own. Phew!!! The first thing I did was back up my important files.

The gddrescue tool is cool because it allows you to copy disk images, a nice way to back up disks bit by bit.

In the meantime, I reinstalled Debian on the second drive (with the windows drive disconnected), so now I had grub on the same drive as Debian. At this point I connected the Windows drive as slave and the Debian drive as master and modified two files in /boot/grub:

/boot/grub/device.map:

(hd0) /dev/hdc
(hd1) /dev/hdd

where hdc corresponds to the debian drive and hdd corresponds to the Windows drive. The second file…

/boot/grub/menu.lst:

lots of stuff….then
title Windows XP
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1
### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST

Apparently Windows will only boot from the first drive, hence the need for the “map” command. Grub then runs the Windows bootloader using the chainloader +1 command. This was not clearly layed out in the grub manual, unfortunately.

The approach described above led to some problems, the grub bootloader would consistently become corrupted. So I did a reinstall of Debian with the Debian disk on IDE channel 1 Master and the Windows XP disk on IDE channel 1 slave. This time, the installer was able to detect Windows XP Pro and grub was installed on the first disk (hda) which gave a grub menu that was able to boot both Windows XP and Debian:

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/hdb1
title Microsoft Windows XP Professional
root (hd1,0)
savedefault
makeactive
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
chainloader +1

I am guessing that possibly Win XP was writing to the boot sector of the Debian drive when I tried to open the Debian drive within Windows XP. I will try to check this again. I backed up the master boot record as follows:

dd if=/dev/hda of=MBR-backup bs=446 count=1

the restore can then be done as:

dd if=MBR-backup of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1

Thus far, this backup has not been needed as the Debian MBR appears to be stable (though it did perform an automatic repair once).

So I ran

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

and set the correct resolution. The “dpkg-reconfigure” command reconfigures an existing package. This then produced the correct settings int he Gnome desktop screen resolution dialog. I used all of the default settings for the keyboard and mouse and changed only the screen resolution.

mount -t smbfs //cifs/myunixid mylocaldir -o username=mydomain\\myunixuserid

A scary moment nonetheless. So now we go about seeing how to do regular backups.

mysql-server

phpMyAdmin and dependencies

There are 2 alternatives which provide `x-www-browser’.

Selection Alternative
———————————————–
*+ 1 /usr/bin/epiphany
2 /usr/bin/iceweasel

Press enter to keep the default[*], or type selection number: 2
Using `/usr/bin/iceweasel’ to provide `x-www-browser’.

gcc-3.3-base (1:3.3.6-15)
libstdc++5 (1:3.3.6-15)

and added the calendar to the Applications Menu as shown here.

Installed the following packages:

icedove (1.5.0.12.dfsg1-0etch1)