I apologise in advance for the vagueness of this post; I am trying to help a friend from long distance and don't have physical access to the system in question.
Yesterday a friend of mine tried to install Mandrake 10 over her Fedora install on her 2nd hard disk. Because of this she had GRUB installed, presumably on the first disk as the loader menu. That first disk also has WinXP on it. As far as I know the install of MDK10 itself went ok, but it broke something in GRUB or whatever and she could no longer boot into XP. The message would be:
Code:
root (hd0,0)
filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7
chainloader +1
GRUB loading stage 2...
and then it would return to GRUB.
From what I can gather, this is a reasonably common occurence with the new distros based on 2.6, and I thought she might need the fix that is documented here:
http://www.fedorafaq.org/#nodualboot . However, she elected to use a WinXP recovery disk, which seems to have trashed grub (as I would have expected) so now she can't boot into either OS.
My question is this: assuming both her disks are physically ok, and her partitions are undamaged, what is the best way of restoring a boot menu to her system - ideally one with no risk to the data on there? I figured there must be a downloadable floppy image that will give the ability to create a new boot menu of some sort. The issue would be in finding one that's foolproof. Additionally, I'm told she has a Fedora floppy that "has errors and will only let me into text mode". I assume that text mode would be just fine if we could be assured of which commands to execute.
