grub error 22. Bad partition table? [solved]

[John Summerfield]

On Thursday 25 November 2004 23:11, Duncan Lithgow wrote:
> > That suggests to me that it's probably safest to put grub in hda1 or so,
> > and mark that partition bootable.
>
> That's the default isn't it? Paul said that MBR is in the first part of
> hda1 - and because I'm also running windows it _has_ to be marked
> bootable (or somewhere before 1024 has to)

If Paul did say that, he's wrong. The _Master_ boot record is on hda - the 
first sector.

To see what's on your system, as root do this:

for d in a{,1,2,2,4}; do  dd if=/dev/hd$d count=1 bs=512 ; done | xxd | less

This will take the first sector from each of the five volumes and write them 
as a single stream to output when then is processed by xxd an less.

Each sector is 200 hex long:
00001f0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 55aa  ..............U.
0000200: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000  ................
the first of these is the last part of hda, the second the first of hda1.



-- 
Cheers
John