I just lost my ability to boot Fatdog64 710

[PappyPuppy]

I cannot believe it. All I did was partition a flash drive. I then rebooted into Fatdog because I had been in Windows one time. When I rebooted, it failed to boot, so I changed the boot options to not use the savefile. So now I can at least boot into Fatdog and I have aufs, but i do NOT have devsave. Perhaps I had done something dumb and put it on devsave or could it be that the 512MB savefile that I see is the file? But normally I have very large save files. I'm very confused right now. I just don't remember on this laptop - how had I set up a month ago? I cannot remember. But it seems I've lost a lot of work - can I get it back somehow? I'm thinking, but I don't really have any strong ideas how to proceed. I guess if I can figure out how to load the .ext4 savefile perhaps I can recover most stuff. I forget how to do it - I'll have to read up on that.

Any help appreciated.
Thanks.

[watchdog]

Make a new install of fatdog64-710 in a new flash drive as explained here:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/web/fa ... drive.html

Then copy the old savefile on to the new flash drive.

[PappyPuppy]

Hi, I was simply booting up off of the CD-ROM drive. I'm not trying to install Fatdog onto a flash drive. I always just boot off of a CD-ROM.

I didn't do ANYTHING to Fatdog. I was just running Fatdog and used GParted to partition a usb flash stick. I wasn't trying to create a boot sequence for Fatdog off of the flash stick.

I don't want to do that - I have other things to do.

Is there some way I can dynamically load/mount my fd64savefile.ext4? And please, does anyone know why simply partitioning a new flash stick would ruin my Fatdog operating system and make devsave disappear?

What, did the boot-loader get tricked into thinking I wanted to boot off of the flash drive even though there is nothing on it, and I haven't made it bootable yet? I don't know, I just wonder, since I have no idea what happened to Fatdog.

I've only used 52GB of the 450GB drive that I normally browse my files on.

I have /dev/sda3 mounted but it can't seem to find the /dev/sda2 and I therefore cannot mount it. That's the UEFI Microsoft reserverd partition. Perhaps this is part of the problem.

[rcrsn51]

Where is the fd64savefile.ext4? On the hard drive? Inside Windows?

[PappyPuppy]

It's there more or less. I can see it. I need to mount it, correct?

It scares me only a LITTLE that it's 512 MB as this is my laptop - perhaps I just haven't yet expanded it's size to match my desktop. Maybe this problem can be solved by remounting it? Is that what you're hinting at?

However, I am VERY worried at the loss of /dev/sda2. Bizarre.

One other comment: Anyone know why my sda3 drive appears with a little circular icon with 8 prongs on it now. It never had that before I partitioned a flash stick today - that's something new. It no longer appears as a drive, but instead as some weird-looking blue folder with a sort of steering wheel icon over it.

I wonder if that one time I booted into Windows, if the Windows operating system did something to that drive, and it messed up the one that's missing also. Damn.

[PappyPuppy]

I don't know, maybe copying a .iso to my hard-drive did something?

I wanted to make it fast when I go to load it so I copied it from the CD to my hard-drive? But my hard-drive has a lot of room? I don't know.

I guess I will try to use the dd command now to do this job but I can't seem to find my Ubuntu iso file.

[PappyPuppy]

And I see my fd64-devx_710.sfs file there too.

And I can see these in Fatdog also.

Perhaps I can somehow get that file loaded when I'm in fatdog.

Perhaps it isn't corrupted by that dumb 1.4 GB copy I did, although I think it's likely that it is. I would hope that something would have complained.

But sadly, I cannot see any Linux stuff right now. If the system is smart enough to reject that file, it might still be ok. It will be interesting if I could see what is in the fd64save.ext4 - ie. read it someho.w

A corrupt fd64save.ext4 would give a logical explanation why I can't boot using a savefile. God, I hope it's not corrupt, but at least it's only my laptop. I should just buy a new laptop and throw this one in the trash.

[PappyPuppy]

This is why I have a 16GB file on my desktop - I know that this covers me for large files. I just have to start over I guess.

[PappyPuppy]

Oh well .....................................................

[PappyPuppy]

Just for fun, I'd like to analyze that .ext4 file. Just to prove that it's really bad, or could I perhaps load it and use it, or some of it? Maybe by some freak it's ok, and I only don't see my old devsave, because it failed to load or is a little corrupt, but fixable.

[rcrsn51]

I don't know how Fatdog works, but in Puppy you can click on a savefile, which will mount it for viewing.

[PappyPuppy]

I just copied too much stuff to devsave and under devsave - like 3 GB in all and something went wrong.

Thank you.

[PappyPuppy]

At this one boot, Fatdog was looking for devices or something and it scared me but everything is normal now - I just lost whatever work I had done - but nt that big of a deal.

[PappyPuppy]

The first time fatdog seemed to use it, but I now realize that Fatdog has gone back to the original savefile again! God, that angers me!

[mini-jaguar]

Is your partition ext4? I had problems and couldn't boot from such a partition, but it worked if the partition was ext2. Haven't tried ext3.

Well maybe you could try, but in my case I had just one partition on the whole USB stick along with FatDog on it (wasn't booting off the CD), so not exactly the same case.