Well it’s unbelievable: I only just got Linux working and Windows stops! It’s almost like it’s gone on strike or something…
I left a dvd encoding over-night (it takes a while…) and the pc wasn’t responding in the morning. A quick reboot reveals that Windows no longer boots. Normally it would at least give an error or something but not a thing, just a mashed-up display (the colour logo progress screen), and it’s the same story in the alleged Safe-mode.
I know that it has nothing to do with the Linux installation because I simply can’t plug the two hard-drives in at once (I only have 1 ide channel so that’s two discs: a main one and my cd/dvd drive). Actually it’s come to the rescue, I’ve unplugged my cd drive so I can both my Linux and Windows drives in at the same time. I’ve then booted Linux and copied all my important stuff off the Windows disc.
There were a few problems to overcome:
The first is that there isn’t any NTFS support in FC6 but using yum (yum install ntfs-3g) I was able to install it.
Next was that the disks hadn’t been closed down properly (Windows crashed) and so I had to ‘repair’ the disk (to some extent anyway). This was done with ntfsfix /dev/hda1. ntfsfix is part of the ntfsprogs package (yum install ntfsprog.i386)
After all that I mounted the Windows disk as read-only and backed my data up.