Another GRUB error 17 thread

I believe this is a simple problem, however I have not been able to find a simple solution to it in this forum and google.

I have been using Ubuntu Hoary (hda1) all the while and GRUB runs great.

Yesterday I installed Suse 9.3 (hdb1 )and Suse's GRUB overwriten the Ubuntu's.

Today I am wise enough to erase off the entire hdb1 while apparently the GRUB in the MBR is still pointing to hdb1.

Now GRUB gives me error 17 and I am unable to boot anything with the GRUB in the MBR.

Now how do I "flash" my MBR back to point to hda1? I have tried reinstalling GRUB with Synaptic but apparently it doesn't touch the MBR.

Thank you for reading.

Dead simple problem

Your Suse Grub was loading hdb1's /boot/grub/menu.lst that has been erased by you and Grub doesn't know what to do!

Think error 17 stands for "No such partition" or something similar

Cure---------------------

You should be able to use Ubuntu's installation CD to replicate its boot loader again.

The standard method is change root to do a grub-install. Steps are

(1) boot up a Live CD, log in as root and drop into terminal mode
(2) make a temp. directory for hda1 --- mkdir /mnt/hda1
(3) Mount device hda1 on it --- mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1
(4) Replicate Ubuntu's boot loader in the MBR -- grub-install /dev/hda
(5) Reboot --- reboot

As a rule you overwrite one boot loader with another. In this case you overwrite Suse's Grub with Ubuntu's Grub, but it can equally it can be Windows MBR or a Lilo.

Originally posted by saikee grub-install /dev/hda

Cool, that's the magic word that I'm looking for.

Thanks.

This just fixed a problem on my machine as well. I started getting IO errors and when I rebooted my machine I was getting the error 17. The steps above fixed mine, but just to clarify for someone who might be trying this also:

in step (4) above be sure to specify the correct directory for the grub install to place the files:
grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/hda1 /dev/hda
if you don't put the correct directory there (wherever you mounted the drive) you will get an error about not being able to create /boot directory because it is a read-only filesystem since it will be trying to make the /boot directory in the filesystem created by the LiveCD you are using.