fscked permissions?

[n01mportant]

I have a laptop which I formally had knoppix installed on, after I got a stable server up and running on a main box i found how useless it was to have knoppix on that laptop.. I went to delete it and for some stupid reason used partitiion magic to just delete the nix partition.. which I believe is where I made the mistake. When i rebooted it still boots to lilo but won't let me boot into linux obviously. I've tried resizing and redistributing the newly avaiable hard drive space with partition magic again, and when I try it gives me this error

-------------------------------------
Error 501 while executing Batch.


Error 501: Cross-linked files were found

Will now reboot
Press Any Key to COntinue.
---------------------------------------

I've considered reinstalling and doing a clean uninstall of nix, but its cd-rom is also physically dead in the water. I do how ever have a floppy drive, but not quite sure what to do, I'm sure there will be a few flames saying bla bla boot disk fix lilo.conf but I'm a bit in the dark as of the exact operation of that. Half my life working on computers, and all I got was this stupid error =\. I don't think I've left any information out, but I could be wrong.. multitasking is fun.. How ever I will be greatly appriciate of any help or advise any one has to offer, and of course my sincerest gratiitude to all who even wasted their time reading =)

[Shadda]

just rewrite your MBR. Whichever OS you plan to install on the laptop in knoppix's stead should already have a tool for doing such a thing (hell, Even winXP bootCD has that option)

[n01mportant]

That would be all well and good, if i could put in a cd.. but I can't thus the problem

[mr_ed]

What else is on the laptop - some flavor of Windows with PM installed? Can you boot to that?

It sounds like if you ran scandisk in Windows you'd find a bunch of hosed files there. Is there anything on that drive that you need to save?

-- Ed

[n01mportant]

I can back it up easily, i have a 120 main server but thats not the problen.. i can't get the hard drive space that used to be taken up by nix, to be allocated anywhere else.. cant use a cd to reinstall anything.. due to the no cd thing.. but yes theres a windows xp home version on it.. with PM, but im not sure quite what to do to get things back into order..

[mr_ed]

Back up what you want, or can. Data are more important than programs, which can be re-installed. If you need to back up programs, copy the registry too. Some of the data may be corrupted, but you can sort that out later.

Run scandisk - just check for data integrity, not the physical media. This should "fix" the crosslinked-files errors (by eliminating them as recognizable files). Then try Partition Magic again.

Let us know if that works, okay?

-- Ed