Last night I found, somewhere on the web, a usable rescue disk called ubcd539.iso, and burned it using some other dodgy software I found called ISO Recorder. I installed other stuff too, it's amazing if I didn't get some viruses on this box. But, I'm now that much closer to having a working system. Somewhere on that rescue disk is a 64-bit kernel and root shell in an Xwindows system called Partition Magic. From there I was able to re-do both botched buster debootstraps, the 64 bit one on /dev/sda3, and the 32-bit one under /opt/buster32 on the same drive. Re-ran extlinux and configured it to use the newly-installed kernel. Overwrote the bootblock I had saved before on the Windows partition, and I'm about ready to re-test, fully expecting it to still fail, but now I'm pretty sure I can replace the Windows boot with grub or lilo if I want to.
last updated 2021-03-26 10:52:33. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com