hi all. i've got a big prob. I installed Win XP on hda1 and red hat on hdb?, i had grub installed on hda, and now i can't boot into win, i got something with chainloader or somethin like that, how can i fix this without formatting or erasing everything? plz make a good explanation because i'm a total noob in linux

ok, first of all don't panic, I'm sure we will be able to help you.

First of all, what *exactly* happens when you boot? Does Grub boot into RH ok? Does Windows appear as an option in the boot menu?

Also, if you post the output of your /etc/grub.conf (it may be /boot/grub.conf depending on distro's) into your post using the "code" tags, it will help a great deal.

when the computer starts up i have two options: dos or red hat. I can boot into red hat but if i boot dos i get

Booting DOS
rootnoverify (hd0,4)
chainloader +1

i can't open the grub.conf because it's locked and i don't have permissions to open it

can you not log in as root and just do
???

Without seeing the full file (and also your /etc/fstab file would help) it is very hard to diagnose, as my grub.conf also has

rootnoverify (hd0,4)
chainloader +1

in it, but it boots fine. (hd is different though due to my partitioning structure)

The more information we have, the easier it will be to try and find the problem.

ok here's the fstab thing

label=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
label=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb8 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/cdrom1 /mnt/cdrom1 udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0


and the grub.conf

# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hdb7
# initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=1
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd1,5)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title red hat linux (2.4.20-8)
root (hd1,5)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-8 ro root=label=/ hdc=ide-scsi noapic
initrd /initrd-2.4.20-8.img
title DOS
rootnoverify (hd0,4)
chainloader +1

hope it will help u

shit my post is completely screwed up! sorry for that

Hi bof (is that meant to be French?),

First of all, maybe you didn't think of this, so: do you have Windows emergency repair disks?

See my post in this thread:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=238285
That post explains how to see what partitions are where using Knoppix. However, you can run fdisk (but to view only and not to write partitions) from your current RedHat installation without using Knoppix. This way you can be sure what is where, which will be useful with GRUB.

You should definitely read the GRUB documentation if you have problems:
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/

Please go to /boot/grub and show us the contents of menu.lst. (I don't even have an /etc/grub.conf on my machine.)

It might be a good idea now to make a bootable rescue floppy now (and test it) in case you mess up the MBR in the near future.

/etc/grub.conf or /boot/grub.conf is essentially the same file as menu.lst, except some distro's keep it in /etc for tidyness reasons.

no i don't have win emergencyrepair disks.what is mbr? and what must i do when i found what is where on the partitions?

it's okj guys the prob is solved i had to edit something in the bootloader at startup, nothing really hard. thx for all the support guys!