Perhaps I'm using this log too much, but I'm sure it will pass after the newness wears off.
I just got my friends PC via UPS and cracked open the case. It had stuff moving around inside, so I didn't want to take any chances of having something loose, or a piece of metal short the motherboard.
Well, after removing some old dried up rubber bands, a wad of some kind of brownish paper-bag-shredded-like dust, I turned the thing on and watched. Finds the hard drive, but won't load anything. Just a blank screen.
Fdisk shows a Windows NT partition, which is what is supposed to be on this system. I tried using Slackware 9.0 CDROM to boot and see if I could read the NTFS Partition, but ntfs isn't supported in the boot kernel, and the module isn't available. So I tried Mandrake 9.1 CDROM, since it has the NTFS resize option. But it had trouble mounting. I figured it was file corruption at the least.
So, upstairs we go. Pulled the skins off the kids Windows XP Pro computer and plugged the hard drive as slave and booted up. XP wanted to run a CHKDSK right away on the drive, but I bypassed, figuring it could be worse if repairs are made without knowing the status of the drive. So after a really long boot sequence I got the desktop. Of course I could hear the drive really working, re-reading man times over.
The drive is an IBM DeskStar, and it has jumper settings for 15/16 heads? I was wondering if the jumper was originally set for 15 when the drive was installed, and my friend, in the course of swapping different drives, switched the wrong jumpers and made it 16 instead of 15. So I powered off, switched jumper to 15 heads and rebooted. XP wanted to CHKDSK again and I refused, at the desktop XP wanted to format. I knew that was no good and shutdown, swapped jumpers back to 16 and started her up again. This time I let it CHKDSK. Lots of errors, but all corrected and it looks pretty good right now. At least most of the information on the drive is readable. I'm not sure if it will boot, but after I run a full disk scan for bad sectors I will throw it back into my friend's PC and see what happens. If it works, I will backup the drive, then try to shrink the partition using Mandrake and the ntfsresize program. If it works I'll be able to install a 2 GB W98 Partition, a 6 GB Linux Partition and the rest will be FAT32 for sharing between operating systems.
Time to check on the drive...