Repair/reinstall grub from within XP?

riddlermarc · 29 Jan 2007 at 09:23

.. is this possible..? Over the weekend I had to reinstall XP (dual-boot machine, needed for work/dev purposes) at home so it has overwritten grub. RDP'ing in from work, I obviously can't stick a live cd in and fix it so I am wondering if there is any way of reinstalling grub from within Windows? I want to access some apps on my linux install (over VNC which is already set up etc), a quick search has proved fruitless but I'm sure there must be a way to do it :/

matja · 29 Jan 2007 at 12:56

The way I've done this before is to run GRUB from a livecd inside VMware, having mounted the boot HD as a physical HD in VMware. Can't think of any other ways to do it while XP is running.

gumbald · 29 Jan 2007 at 13:36

matja said:
The way I've done this before is to run GRUB from a livecd inside VMware, having mounted the boot HD as a physical HD in VMware. Can't think of any other ways to do it while XP is running.

Sounds very complicated, but doable

riddlermarc · 29 Jan 2007 at 14:55

matja said:
The way I've done this before is to run GRUB from a livecd inside VMware, having mounted the boot HD as a physical HD in VMware. Can't think of any other ways to do it while XP is running.

Cunning, hadn't thought of that! Cheers, will give it a go and let you know how it goes

matja · 29 Jan 2007 at 16:18

Oh, tip: remember to NEVER boot Windows (or any OS, for that matter) inside VMware on the same physical partition on which it is already running (if you see what I mean).

You'll get the Windows splash screen come up all nice and dandy, but the damage is already done, lovely corrupted filesystem. I've done this accidently, several times, annoyingly.

I'd always use the boot menu inside the VMware BIOS to manually select the disk you want to boot, and be very careful about booting your physical disk.

riddlermarc · 29 Jan 2007 at 16:26

Success

I followed the second set of instructions here for sorting out grub and it was all fine