Hi,

- Did you have an operating system on your computer before installing SliTaz (which is another complete operating system) ?

- How many harddisks does your computer have ?

-- Babaorum

yes i had windows xp. only 1 hard disk.

is there any way to get back to my windows xp i had a bunch of stuff on there that i dont want to lose?? if there is a way to reverse what i did or how to extract what i had on there u can email me at wholesaleunlimitedam@yahoo.com or just post on here is fine up to u. thanks for the help

ouch. "Running install" sounds like you could pretty well have caused some damage, depending what you chose as installation settings. linux distributions like ubuntu or crunchbang usually give you the choice to use the whole HD (erasing all) or partition the drive first (and installing with dual-boot behind the windows partition, thus keeping it). I don't know if Slitaz supports dual boot, as I am just using it in RAM only.

to rescue your data, boot into slitaz or any other (small) linux distro with live-usb or live-CD and open the former windows harddisk and try copy as much as you can to an external drive, DVD or USB drives.like this I could save data from some serious damaged HDs where was no OS at all on. just with a small Linux on live CD like Puppy or Slitaz that ran in Ram. Not installed!

if there is nothing to see anymore at all, you probably formatted your HD during the installation. Then there must be some recovery tools for this, since the data might still be around physically, just not allocated anymore,

you know, when selling your old computer on ebay to shady people, everyone is telling you to format and overwrite your drive to really delete your data - dozens and dozens of time - so your data could still be there. but I am not a Professional rescue-techie-first aid guy..

If you see no remainders of your old stuff, you best seek advice from an professional. and do not copy more stuff over the "empty" drive, this might overwrite your data for good. slitaz is very small on your HD, so probably there's hope and some linux powertool might rescue you.

Don't Panic & Good Luck!

wait how do i do it?? i turned on the lapptop with the cd in and now im at the slitaz. how to i get to the windows harddisk?? everything i go onto is like weird files like root and src var and stuff like that?? im lost still. and also when i did the slitaz installer all it did was was i think a dual boot like u say but i can get it to go to the windows it only stays in the slitaz not windows

To look for Windows...

Go to
Menu - System Tools - Gparted

From there you should be able to see what filesystem or partitions that are present at your hardrive. Post here the result...

Secondly, you can try
go to
Menu - System Tools - Mount Devices

From there you might see your drive as hdc1(at least I do)

Choose the proper device to mount in dropdown menu

Press mount

Look for your windows in files, just on the right side of menu

Andy, first off, breath!

Now, a few questions to better diagnose your problem:

1. As I've never used Slitaz in anything but a "live" in RAM environment, when you installed it, was there any mention of selecting partitions to install to or formatting said partitions at any time during the process?

2. Without the Slitaz CD in the computer does not boot into ANY operating system, correct?

Depending on your answer to 1) above, we can figure out whether it will be possible to recover the data you mentioned. If you did indeed repartition or format the windows partition, recovery will be impossible (without seeking very expensive professional help that is). However, if it's merely a bad GRUB install - meaning the computer simply isn't being told where to find the files it requires to load either operating system, then your files still exist and, as mentioned by previous posters, should be recoverable by simply booting into a LIVE linux distribution, mounting the windows partition and copying the folders/files you're interested in saving to an external drive/USB key or even burning them to a disk. That being said, if it is just a bad GRUB install (or more likely, an entirely missing GRUB), you should be able to recover the windows install entirely by using the Windows Recovery Console and invoking fixmbr or fixboot - Google search these commands for more details. That's for Windows XP - Vista or 7 use a different bootloader and the command there is bootsect.exe or bootrec.exe - again, Googling these would be more helpful than I can hope to offer.

-double post-

1 it didnt ask about any partitions. and 2 it will not boot into anything without the cd it just gives a error message. now when i am doing the mount thing there is a /dev/root and when i mount now there is the same thing plus the /dev/hda1 and theres nothing there to go to a menu. if i double click ethier one it takes me to all the files but there all weird files and it tells me im in super user mode. i cant find the windows file. i looked everywhere. so any help on this?? Also i did the FIXBOOT and i clicked yes and it did it and then i tryed restarting and it wouldnt work still without the cd then i tryed the FIXMBR and now when i restart it tells me NTLDR is missing press any key to restart and then it just keeps going to the same thing eveytime i press anykey.????

Look here - this outlines a few more possibilities.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/318728

Andy --

I think you need a refresher on Linux basics.

Those 'wierd files' is the Linux directory structure. Just as Windows has "Documents and Settings", "Windows", "Windows\System32", "Temp" etc., Linux has "bin" for binaries (programs), "etc" for configuration, "mnt" for mounted fileststems etc. all housed under /

Where Windows uses letters for partitions, like C:, D: etc., Linux has only one structure; other filesystems that are not the currently running distribution are mounted (loaded) under the /mnt directory. I currently use /mnt/windows for my XP partition, /mnt/usbhdd for my external hard-disk and so on.

You will need to find out what your partition layout is like by using gParted as Atle described above. It may be useful to know that the way in which Linux identifies partitions & drivers is different from Windows. Windows just plonks them in order by letter; in Linux, drives go by the connection, then a letter & partitions are suffixed with a number. The second SCSI hard-disk will be 'sdb' (SCSI disk B), the third partition on that drive will be 'sdb3', for example.

I suspect, with only one HDD, it will just be one drive (hda or sda) with one partition for XP (hda1 or sda1). If this is the case, and if you did install SliTaz to disk, then you may have problems. The reason being that you overwrote XP with SliTaz. The bootloader is still the Windows one, and it's getting confused that it can't find NTLDR, the Windows NT+ loader: it's not there because you overwrote it with SliTaz's installer. You can, though, install GRUB over the Windows bootloader to start using SliTaz on your hard-disk.

I'm tired now.

When using the MountBox, you need to select the partition that you want to access and a directory to house it in. For example, you may want to mount /dev/sda1 in /mnt/harddisk.

... and you'll want to have a look at the hard-disk from the Live CD, otherwise it'll get confusing. Remember that when you boot the CD, / is not on your hard-disk but the live filesystem in RAM.

ok im confused now lol. so if its not on my hard disk but in the live filesystem in ram is there a way i can get a cd like a windows one or something like slitaz did but using windows and to reverse what i did just like i did with slitaz but switch it around with windows? cause ive tryed the mount stuff and when i browse the files theres nothing in them they just open up into a new folder with another folder and so on till i get to the last folder with notheing in it..... and im a newbie when it comes to anything but windows.

Here is a tutorial to see what happened to the drive.

Boot into the livecd, go to the bottom left corner of the desktop where the Start menu is located in Windows XP

Click the second button to the right of Menu between the folder and firefox globe buttons to open XTerm Terminal.

You are tux@slitaz

Typesu press the Enter key

system asks for Password:

what you type will not show in the terminal, this is normal

Typeroot press the Enter key

you should now be

root@slitaz

Typefdisk -lthat is a lowercase L, press the Enter key

The hard disk could be listed as /dev/hda or /dev/sda.

The 2 last columns on the right Id and System have the critical info.

The drive was reformated if Id is 3 and System is Linux

You might be able to recover the data with testdisk.tazpkg

Tutorial: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

WinXP and your data is still on the drive if Id is 7 and System is HPFS/NTFS
or Id is b and System is W95 FAT32

Boot the livecd with a USB external drive attached.
Click Menu ,Run, in Run box type subox pcmanfm Click ok to launch subox click ok to launch PCmanfm which is the same as windows explorer on WinXP.

Click on the Volumes in the left column to mount internal drive to /media/disk and the USB drive off /media/LABEL name or flash.

Open a tab for each drive and switch from Location to file tree mode with folder button at bottom of left column.Copy the data from your internal hard drive,click the other tab and paste to the external USB.

Go to /var/log and open the slitaz-installer.log in Leafpad text editor to see what the installer did.

The slitaz-installer from tazusb with slitaz-2.0.iso loop mounted to /media/cdrom doing a full install to an external USB hard drive.

Grub menu.lst mods include rootdelay=10 and change root=/dev/sdb1 to root=/dev/sda1 and Root(1,0) to Root(0,0)



start_installer: Sun Jan 3 02:05:53 EST 2010
mount: mounting /dev/ on /media/cdrom failed: Block device required
ask_for_target_dev: /dev/sdb1
ask_for_target_dev: /dev/sdb1

mkfs_target_dev: ext3
mke2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
123648 inodes, 246991 blocks
12349 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=255852544
8 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
15456 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376

Writing inode tables: 0/81/82/83/84/85/86/87/8done
Creating journal (4096 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

This filesystem will be automatically checked every 28 mounts or
180 days, whichever comes first. Use tune2fs -c or -i to override.

Mounting the DFS root for domain not implemented yet
No ip address specified and hostname not found
install_kernel: vmlinuz-2.6.25.5-slitaz

LZMA 4.57 Copyright (c) 1999-2007 Igor Pavlov 2007-12-06
grub_config: /mnt/target/boot/grub/menu.lst
install_files: OK
Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.
/usr/sbin/grub-install: line 434: grub-probe: not found
sh: xfs: unknown operand
end_of_install: Sun Jan 3 02:13:34 EST 2010

(Just to clarify your last post, Andy: there may or may not be SliTaz installed on the disk. When you boot form the CD, it doesn't use the one that might be on the disk, but loads a new, separate filesystem in to RAM from the CD.)

so if its not booting from the disk and only the cd is there a easier way to just get a cd like the slitaz one but for windows?? and just boot that one like i did the slitaz cd?? or should i just try the above stuff first?

and thanks everyone for the help i really appreciate all the help from everyone

It sounds like we're all dealing with layers upon layers of confusion on both sides of the aisle at this point.

Andy: yes, by all means try the above suggestions and figure out whether or not the windows partitions was overwritten/still exist? You can do this as suggested in a Slitaz live environment (the fdisk method described above) or in any other live distribution (many of the tools mentioned should be present on most live distro environments).

That being said, after reviewing seawolf's comment and piecing together what probably happened for myself, I'm almost certain that he, in fact, came to the correct conclusion and that you did install slitaz, overwriting your single windows partition. Like I mentioned in my first post, if this is the case, it will probably prove prohibitively complex/expensive to recover those files. Installing GRUB to the mbr of the hard drive in question should allow you to boot that installed slitaz system however.

hi
Open file /boot/grub/menu.lst (in root) and write in like that:

title Windows XP

root (hd0,0)

chainloader +1


and save it and reboot
At reboot select "windows XP" and let 's go

That will continue to boot SliTaz :)

Hi,

This cannot help unless Windows distribution is still on the hard drive, so this is the very first question to answer... In order to know it , we must know what happened during SliTaz installation, and how was organized the hard drive before SliTaz installation.

As we all know, default behaviour of SliTaz installer is to take the whole hard drive to make only one partition for SliTaz. It this happened, important parts or moreover all of Windows components were rip out of the drive.

That's the major part of the problem, AMHO.

It is up to Andy to let us know what is happening, some valuable advices were already proposed here...

Regards,

-- Babaorum