Grub stuck in an endless loop.

dikadika · 02-26-2005, 01:55 PM

I am having issues getting grub to load windows, when i tell it to boot windows all it does is reload grub. It sounds like i may have accidently configured grub on the windows drive and it just points back to itself. Is tehre a way to undo that? is there a way to fix it? I am also having issues getting fixmbr to work in the xp rescue mode.... it doesnt recognize the drive that i need to fixmbr on... ugh frustration.

Anyone have any suggestions?

here is my menu.lst file
http://www.ogmack.org/linux

thanks in advance for your help

320mb · 02-26-2005, 04:51 PM

man fdisk

http://man.linuxquestions.org/index....ction=0&type=2

homey · 02-26-2005, 04:56 PM

You should be able to boot with the xp cdrom and use some tools. I can't remember for sure but it seems they are called fixboot and fixpart or similar.

Then, when you go to fix the grub boot loader, be sure to put it into /dev/hda and NOT /dev/hda1 .

syg00 · 02-26-2005, 06:43 PM

No, it seems grub is installed o.k. - menu is apparently being shown.
From a Linux console try

Code:

fdisk -l (that's l for list)

I'm wondering if you have a vendor "recovery" partition on that first disk.
Maybe try rootnoverify (hd0,1) instead - depends on where your XP partition is, of course.

dikadika · 02-27-2005, 07:46 PM

Thanks for all the helpfull suggestions. It was apparently an issue with grub being written to the boot sector of the partition (where my windows installation was located) rather then the MBR of the drive.

I fixed the issue by using the recovery console in windows XP to fix the boot sector and the mbr for the drive. then using the FC3 recovery console to chroot to the image, then grub-install /dev/sda

once i did this everything was working like it should. The issue i was having was finding the drivers for my SATA controller on the internet. Once i found them the process was smooth.

Thanks again for the help everyone.