HEELLPPP!!!!!!!! file system crash

[cdhgold]

i'm getting the follwing errors on boot

RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
invalid compressed format (err=2)
VFS: CAnnot open root device "sda2" or unknown block(0,0)
Please append a "root=" boot option
Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown block(0,0)

How I got here
OS is SLES9 . I have Vmware installed and left it last night in middle of installing a guest Os to pick up where i left of this morning. At the point I left the guest install it was stopped waiting for floppy from me. Got up and found system frozen at screen saver(which is jsut red blank screen) . had to power system off and this is what greeted me on boot up. There are other guest OS installed that have not been backup yet. Can I recover without wiping and reinstalling?

thanks in advance
cdhgold

[Void Main]

This is what VMware did to my laptop:

viewtopic.php?t=1474

I was using "whole disk" mode though which they highly discourage. That along with a screwed up partition table from an FC2 install.

[worker201]

Void, is that an official condemnation of VMWare? It seems to do only evil...

[cdhgold]

how can i generate a rescue disk to try to recover? or are there any other ideas or suggestions? once I have a rescue disk how do i being to run a fsck check? this is unfamialr territory for me with linux. to this point i would normally just reload but in this case want to do whatever i can to recover.

[Ice9]

Use a knoppix cd to rescue your data.
You can also run fdisk, fsck, debugfs and other disk uitlities from the cd.

[Void Main]

Void, is that an official condemnation of VMWare? It seems to do only evil...

No, certainly not. I have been buying and using VMware since 1.0, it's a great product. It's just not perfect in that it can't compensate for host OS issues like screwed up partition tables (and this is only based on my sample of one major file system disaster). If anything I think it was an FC2 partitioning issue but I am not really sure. I know there were issues with FC2 partition tables and even though I was running FC3 on the machine I think I originally installed either FC1 or FC2 and had upgraded to FC3 when it came out.