Hello All,
I wanted to try out this month's Chip DVD which showed a blank disk in Etch. It has Kubuntu 6.10. So I rebooted to try out the same dvd in windows. However I missed the boot-loader and it booted back into Debian. While it was in progress, I gave the 3 finder salute and the pc rebooted decently and this time I selected xp. However it would not load beyond the account login part.
I attached a spare hdd and booted into debian and backed up my entire disk for safety. Then using the xp recovery console I gave the command 'chkdsk c: /p' and now I am able to boot into the admin account only and that too slowly. Many features have got disabled. In short, I got to reload windows for the first time ever since I got the system 5 years ago with all its umpteen updates having to be reloaded again. :P
My fstab has ntfs as the file system for the win partition. Now I have added a hash to that line to prevent the partition from being mounted in Linux. This is a caution to all those using Debian Etch with an NTFS partition in the pc. Please don't keep the ntfs partition permanently mounted via /etc/fstab. From other problems too, Debian Etch is far from 'Testing' or almost stable. Its *Unstable* .