Install of FC4T3 fails to update MBR in Windows dual boot env.

[akonstam at trinity.edu]

On Tue, May 24, 2005 at 02:17:04PM +1000, Srihari Vijayaraghavan wrote:
> A friend of mine had this happened to him:
> 
> ##### starts here #####
> My PC has 3 installs of Windows XP SP2 accessed via
> Windows boot manager.
> When I install FC4T3 onto 10 gig of empty space on 2nd
> hard drive, the install would complete successfully,
> but on reboot the windows boot manager is still there,
> with no sign of grub. I have installed 4 times with
> same result.
> ##### Ends here #####
> 
> It seems as if anaconda 'forgot' to write the Grub on
> the MBR of the Primary master IDE hard drive. Does
> this sound like a known bug? Do you need more
> information?
> 
> We are happy to raise a bug in bugzilla. A quick
> search on bugzilla did not reveal a similar bug.
> 
> Thanks
> Hari
> 
It is too early in the morning to make guarantees but here are some thoughts:
1. It is not unheard of for the running of grub-install to not replace
the Windows boot-loader in the MBR. grub-install as a glitch that makes
it sometimes not to work.
2, So you can remove the boot-loader in one of 2 ways;
	a. run the dos command: fdisk /mbr
	b. run the unix command:
		dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=446 count 1

3. boot linux rescue and chroot to /mnt/sysimage that should be the /
partition of your linux. Then run:
grub
grub> root (hd1,1)   <-- that assumes your /partition is on /dev/hdb1
			If not change the ,1 part accordingly.
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> quit

I am also assuming that your grub.conf has the proper entries for the
Windows XP systems.


-- 

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If your aim in life is nothing, you can't miss.
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Aaron Konstam
Computer Science
Trinity University
telephone: (210)-999-7484