I just installled FC5 on my desktop PC and instead of seeing the grub splash screen that I was used to seeing on my previous installation I saw a grub command line. My first instinct was, o something screwed up. I reinstalled but this time instead of installing grub to /boot I installed it to MBR. FOr some reason now when I try to boot into windows it just keeps saying
Booting to Windows in X seconds
and then when the count down finishes it flickers and redisplays the same thing restarting the coutn down. This makes me thing that grub was installed on my main windows partition. Is there a way I can reinstall windows and not lose any of the information that was there before, or is it too far gone.
Thanks for the help.

JuanitoWilder

You shouldn't have to reinstall windows. All that was likely done was the MBR was overwritten. You can either configure grub to boot windows correctly (there are LOADS of documents around the web on doing just that), or you can restore windows boot loader. If you need to restore the windows boot loader, that too is covered numerous times around the web:
http://www.google.com/linux?hl=en&lr...er&btnG=Search

That search string pulls up a lot of choices. My personal choice from that search would be the second one:
http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux...w2k-HOWTO.html

Cool

the grub.conf file was correctly made to boot into windows or gnu/linux but instead of just booting to the default I was getting the grub command line.
I tried going into Windows recovery and I treid doing a fixmbr. It said it completed successfully but the problem still persists. I think maybe I was wrong and when I did the reinstall instead of writting to the MBR I may have written to hda1 (I thought they were the same) and it overwrote some sort of file table. When I try to mount the drive from linux I get a bad FS error and when I try to rerun windows setup on the hda1 it tells me that the partition is to badly damaged (or wrong file system) and that it will need to reformat. It was an NTFS but now it says unknow when I run the Windows setup. THe fdisk -l command in linux still says it is an NTFS/(some other four char acronym I cannot remember) nut when I try to mount it there is an error.
Is there a way to recover the file table (I do not exactly know how NTFS records the file organization).

Thanks

Hmmm, sounds a bit over my head. If there is nothing absolutely dire that you need on that device, I'd go with the re-install probably. If you really want to try to recover first, you could try using fsck, but I don't really know what kind of things it can actually do with NTFS... Another option might be to try a simple re-install of Grub to see if you can get it fixed without repairing windows at all (may just be the corrupt boot loader in windows, in which case, grub might be able to bypass it with some fancy drive remapping). Generally speaking, Boot Loaders don't tweak OS's. So, it's probably just going to be a game of fixing the MBR and choosing a boot loader, and getting it to work as you want/need it to.

Good Luck!

Cool

Ya, I will try some more messing around with GRUB and hope I can point it in the right place, I just think it is wierd that even with the correct RPMs installed I am no longer able to mount the drive in linux, and that when I use the windows recovery it doesn't recognize the format of the drive.

If I find anything that works I will try to post my steps so that FC5 doesn't hurt anyone else.
So far my experience with FC and RH before that has always had difficulty upgrading of new installations, and it looks like FC5 is the worst (of course some of that may be my fault for tinkering and not always doing things how I should).

Well it was a fairly simple fix, I guess it was just made harder because of my stress and anxiety about losing a lot of information.

Somewhere throughout my installation process I told grub to install to hda1 which is the NTFS partition of my computer, and I thought it would overwrite MBR and everyhting would be fine. But I guess in the NTFS boot sector there is information that says "this file system is NTFS" and that was overwritten, and that was pretty much all that was happening. This caused me not to be able to mount the drive in linux or boot into windows. It also didn't allow me to use the Windows installation disk to do a normal upgrade which makes a new MBR. In previous attempts I had used the recovery console and tried the command FIXMBR which I thought should do the trick. It was not until later that I used FIXBOOT and that was the solution to my problem, so all is good now,
Thanks for the help MasterC
JuanitoWilder