I was planning to try Sabayon distro on my laptop and using partition magic on the windows side, I deleted the 2 logical and swap partitions housing a Suse distro. I didn't bother with the Extended entry since I assumed that the Sabayon would see this and use it.
Anyway, I can't boot anything now. Regardless of what I put into the cd/dvd or floppy drive (I have access to the bios and changed the boot sequence appropriately), I get this Msg.
" Grub loading,...wait"
Error 22
followed by Nothing. It appears that the machine doesn't proceed to the next step i.e. to boot the DVD or Floppy.
I tried to booting Knoppix from Disk, same thing.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Matthew

If you have properly set the BIOS to poll the floppy or cd/dvd drive before the hard drive, in search of a bootable operating system, then it should boot a bootable disk in the floppy or cd/dvd drive.

If such a disk doesn't boot, there are three possiblies to consider:
a) the floppy or cd/dvd disk is not bootable for some reason pertaining to the disk you are using.
b) both the floppy and cd/dvd drives have failed simultaneously.
c) something on the motherboard has failed which prevents booting from either the floppy or cd/dvd drive.

I have two (yep, count 'em) laptops that will not boot from CD (regardless of BIOS settings) unless a "magic" key is held down during POST.
The Toshiba uses the <C> key, and boots directly from the CD. The Dell uses F12 to pull up a boot menu of all valid devices found - including CD and USB.
Maybe you have a similar situation - check your user guide.

To get Restore Windows try Task B1 or B2 of the last link in my signature. Just make sure the Windows disk is the boot disk. It will fire up.

After you get the Windows back you can proceed with Sabayon installation.

Or you could install Sabyaon now and its Grub will dual boot the deal Windows.

If you set the Bios to boot to CDrom make sure you have a bootable CD or DVD there first.

Even though I had dvd/cdrom in 1st position to be polled first in the bios, it persisted in rolling over to ide 0 where the grub fragment resided. What I had to do was to use the option to make "ide 0 un-bootable", leaving cdrom in 1st polling position.
This worked and I was able to install Sabayon with ease. As expected, it wouldn't boot from disk after installation, so I had to reverse and make ide 0 bootable.
Many thanks for your support and handholding.

hi drmjh,
same problem here , bios seems to skip the order u tell it and grub just loads no matter what u do ... trying to kill the mbr of the drive is difficult if u can't boot of cd rom floppy usb etc .. can u tell me how u managed to make ur drive unbootable ... thx in advance ...

F2 should get you into the bios.
goto the boot devices. My bios has an option to 'remove' the boot device from the polling area and place it beneath the list. This is a temporary move and easy to reverse when you need. Just be sure you choose the proper device, usually ide 0.
Not all bios-es are the same however and you may have to tease around to find out how yours works.

thx drmjh,
no option in my bios for that , but in case any one else has this problem , i resolved it ( in my case cdrom and hardsisk where on same ide cable ) by setting cdrom as master and hard drive as slave then grub didn't over rule my bios settings ....
weird problem ....

anyways thx again ...