Reinstalling grub?

Peter Reed mrdeadworry at gmail.com
Tue Oct 10 21:34:51 UTC 2006


Nigel Henry wrote:
> On Tuesday 10 October 2006 21:37, Knute Johnson wrote:
>>> On Tuesday 10 October 2006 20:41, Knute Johnson wrote:
>>>> I have WinXP installed on the first hard drive and FC5 on the second.
>>>>  I was using grub as the boot loader but it was destroyed when I had
>>>> to reload Winblows.  I'm sure that I can start FC from a CD and mount
>>>> the second drive but how do I reload grub?  Any pointers would be
>>>> greatly appreciated.
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Knute Johnson
>>>> Molon Labe...
>>> Put the 1st FC5 disc in. Choose Linux-rescue. You will be presented with
>>> harddrive options. Choose the one that has FC5 on it, and you will end up
>>> with a command prompt. Type. chroot /mnt/sysimage.  Now you can reinstall
>>> Grub on the Winblows drive. If Winblows is using hda, type.
>>> grub-install /dev/hda .  If all goes well, Grub should now be installed in
>>> the MBR of the Winblows drive. Reboot, and you should have Grubs menu
>>> back.
>>>
>>> Nigel.
>> I'm with you Nigel but how does grub know that the Linux drive is
>> hdb?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> --
>> Knute Johnson
>> Molon Labe...
> 
> Mainly because if you have 2 harddrives, and Windows is on the first one 
> (hda), Grub is not going to be on that, as it's a linux bootloader.
> 
> Say for instance you only had one harddrive. You have installed Windows first 
> on the drive, so it is labelled as hda1, and boots up using the windows 
> bootloader, using ntldr. You now install FC5 on the same drive (presuming 
> that you have free space on the drive). You create a / partition for FC5, say 
> this is hda3, and a /home partition hda4. Grub is waiting to be installed 
> somewhere, and you are given options as to where you want to install it 
> during the OS install. The default option is the MBR, and if you go for this 
> Grub will be installed in the MBR of hda (where windows was booting from), 
> but will add a chainloader entry to /boot/grub/grub.conf , so that you can 
> not only boot up FC5, but Windows too, as you know.
> 
> If you had to reinstall the Windows OS (a common occurence) , the MBR would be 
> taken over by the Windows bootloader (ntldr), and now you need to reinstall 
> Grub on the MBR (the situation you find yourself in). 
> 
> You now load the 1st FC5 cdrom, and type linux-rescue. this will give you 
> options for the harddrive partition you want to work with. You know that 
> Windows is on hda1 so thats not the correct option, as Grub isn't on that. 
> The only other option should be hda3, which is the / partition for FC5, and 
> Grub is set up on that, but not installed to be used as a bootloader at the 
> moment. 
> 
> Back to the linux-rescue disc, choose hda3 as the harddrive partition, which 
> will get you a command prompt. Type. chroot /mnt/sysimage . this will get you 
> another command prompt. Now you can put Grub wherever you like, but were 
> going to put back in the MBR of hda where the reinstall of Windows had 
> removed it from. So you type. grub-install /dev/hda  , and if all goes well 
> Grub should be reinstalled in the MBR of hda, and when you next reboot you 
> should get a Grub menu with options for FC5, and "other" which will be 
> Windows.
> 
> I had a lot of problems with bootloaders initially when working with Linux, 
> but over time I have become more clued up as how how they work. 
> 
> Post back if you still have problems in getting this working again.
> 
> Nigel.
> 
> 
> 
> 
How about giving Super Grub a try.  It can be found here:
http://adrian15.raulete.net/grub/tiki-index.php
Looks like a good answer for all of us that are having problems with
windows and Linux dual booting.
Peter

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