Problems with GRUB.

BoomAM

BoomAM

BoomAM

Soldato
Joined
5 Jul 2003
Posts
16,206
Location
Atlanta, USA
Hi.
Im having quite a few problems with GRUB.

Basic Info:
SATA HDD on Laptop. WinXP. Ubuntu 6.06.

Basically, i booted into XP yesterday, set my TPs updator going, and it told me about a 1.3Gb update to the R&R Partition on my TP. So i DLed it & installed it. Anyway. I come to boot the laptop now, and it gets to a screen where it says 'GRUB' at the top, then does nothing. So now i cant access anything at all.

The only live CD/install CDs ive got to hand are the 5.04 ones, ive lost my 6.06 CD, and i havnt got anymore CDs to burn anymore.

Ive read loads of guide's on the Ubuntu Forums, but none of the work.

Any ideas?

Thanks in Advance All. :)
 
Im making a very big stab in the dark here, but guessing the R&R update is for some form of recovery partition on your Windows install? It's possible that this has overwritten your boot sector. Could be a difficult thing to fix, as it sounds like you will need to reinstall grub and reconfigure your grub.conf file, having first established that all your partitions are present and correct (sudo /sbin/fdisk -l should get you started off with this).
 
The partitions are there.
Using an 5.04 Live cd, doing a fdisk-l shows me all the partitions are present.

What is it i need to do next then?
 
Code: 
Disk /dev/sda: 100.0GB, 100030242816 bytes
255 heads, 63 secors/track, 12161 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device       Boot       Start     End     Blocks        Id     System
/dev/sda1     *         1          9005   72332631    7      HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2                11617   12161  4377240     12     Compaq diagnostics
Partition 2 does not end of cylinder boundary
/dev/sda3                9006     11355  18876375    83    Linux
/dev/sda4                113256  11616  2096482+    82    Linux swap / Solaris

Partition table enteries are not in disk order
 
You have a couple options here.

1. You can nuke grub for now to see if you can get the XP partition going. You need to use a bootable floppy or CD with DOS on it and type fdisk /MBR. The Windows 98SE boot floppy has Dos 7.10 iirc.

2. You can restore grub to the MBR.

What does it say when you find /boot/grub/stage1 ?

On a one hard disk system with Win 2K pro on 1st partition and Linux on 2nd, I usually do :

grub
root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)
 
eXor said:
2. You can restore grub to the MBR.

What does it say when you find /boot/grub/stage1 ?
Click to expand...
At the moment it says
'No such file or directory'.

But when konsole has finished DLing to this liveOS, i'll try it again as root. (i cant access root with the standard terminal, it asks me for a password, which i dont know!?)
 
did you enter the grub environment from the live CD by typing "grub" as root as the command prompt before using the find command. Also, could you mount your linux partition and list the contents of your grub.conf file?
 
And where am i finding this file? Are you sure you dont mean menu.lst?

Oddly, ive restarted, and now fdisk now reports my windows partition as the bootable one.
Ive gone through some grub stuff to set my linux one as the boot one, but fdisk isnt reporting it as the boot one?
 
Ive fixed it i think.
Ive just rebooted and the grub menu is showing.
Im just gonna see if it boots into everything properly (ubuntu, winxp, ibm).
 
Ubuntu appears to work fine.
The IBM R&R OS appears to work as well.
As does WindowsXP.

Thanks for the help bty ppl. :)
 
n1 :)

btw grub.conf and menu.lst are one and the same, at least on my configuration:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 May 15 13:35 menu.lst -> ./grub.conf
 
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