Linux Community Magazine

A lot of us use the dual boot systems in which multiple operating systems, such as Windows and Linux, can be accommodated in an effort to get the best of all worlds. Using such systems can be very helpful when you have to test certain software on various platforms. In these systems, you have the option to switch to the particular system at the startup. However, sometimes due to various reasons the system is unable to start. In such situations, you should resort to performing in-place methods to fix the problem. If you are not able to address the situation, then you should use a third-party Linux recovery software to resolve the issue.

Consider a scenario wherein you have converted your system in a dual-boot system with Windows XP and RedHat Linux distribution. While in the Windows system, you accidentally clicked the 'Hibernate' option instead of the 'Shut Down' option. Now, when you start your system you are unable to do so.

Cause:

The root cause of this problematic situation is that when you chose to hibernate rather than shut down, then the MBR may have got overwritten by the GRUB. Therefore, you are unable to start the Linux system.

Resolution:

To resolve this issue, you need to restore the GRUB. To do this, you need to perform the following steps:

Boot the system with the Fedora (RedHat) distribution CD.

At the boot prompt, enter the following command and press Enter.

boot: linux rescue

You will prompted for few questions. Answer them and the Fedora installer will mount the system in the /mnt/sysimage directory.

Make the directory as your root directory by using the following command:

# chroot /mnt/sysimage

# _

From here, use the following command to install GRUB loader on the MBR:

# grub-install /dev/hda

Restart the system. It should be able to boot properly now.

However, if the problem is still not resolved then you should use reformat the hard disk and reinstall the operating system. But this method would remove all the valuable data, in all probability. So to restore the inaccessible data, you should use a third-party Linux hard drive recovery software. Such Linux recovery tools are read-only in nature that use fast yet sophisticated scanning algorithms.

Stellar Phoenix Linux Data Recovery is a Linux hard drive recovery software that recovers lost, deleted, or formatted data from inaccessible Linux hard drives. It is able to recover data from various file systems such as ext2, ext3, ext4, FAT32, FAT16, and FAT12. In addition, this Linux recovery tool is capable of recovering data from various types of hard drives such as SCSI, SATA, EIDE, and IDE. Also, this Linux recovery software is supported by various Linux distributions such as Red Hat, SUSE, Debian, Caldera, Mandrake, Sorcerer, TurboLinux, Slackware, Gentoo, etc. It is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, Server 2003, XP, and 2000.