OK guys -- end of problem.
After a weekend's crash course in data recovery and forensics, I'm now
back to where I was four days ago -- despite a professional (and highly
competent) data recovery company quoting me £350 + VAT to get my pictures
back, and advising me to just re-format my disk and start anew.
I'm too stubborn to do that (and too poor); but I did fear it was the
only option for me at one point.
However, after my data partitions sorted themselves out (which I could
probably have done by running e2fsck from an external boot), I spent a
day trying to solve the: 'unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (0,0)'
problem.
Fortunately, DD Andy Cater realised (eventually) that all I really needed
to do was:
1) boot from an external source (I used Knoppix 3.4);
2) create a new directory and mount the boot partition in it;
[mkdir /mntpt ; mount -t ext3 /dev/<hda2> /mntpt]
3) cd to the new directory; check contents to verify;
[cd /mntpt ; ls -al]
4) from within the new directory, chroot to the same directory;
[chroot /mntpt]
5) from there, run lilo (as root; from the new directory).
Problem solved.
(Mind you, lilo came up with a shedload of objections -- mainly about the
wrong version of devmapper -- but it worked. Lilo ran, and enabled the
system to find its initrd image. Re-boot from hard drive no problem.)
And I'd also made sure before running lilo that I was happy with the
contents of lilo.conf and fstab.
Thanks a bunch to all who helped -- I now have more copies of these
pictures than I know what to do with!
Cheers all,
--
Martin Wheeler - StarTEXT / AVALONIX - Glastonbury - BA6 9PH - England
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.startext.co.uk/mwheeler/
GPG pub key : 01269BEB 6CAD BFFB DB11 653E B1B7 C62B AC93 0ED8 0126 9BEB
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