So I installed Linux a while back on my secondary hd. Grub was letting me choose which drive to boot when I powered up. But I was almost out of space on my primary drive, and hadn't used Linux much, and had nothing saved under linux. So I went into Windows disk management and repartitioned the secondary drive back to windows. I subsequently moved about 20 gigs of stuff back onto it and deleted it from the primary drive.

Now, when I boot up, Grub tries to start and I get the famous "loading .5/Error 17" message. I see some references in the forum, but not clear on a solution.

I have a windows OS cd (not sure if it's bootable), but when I try it it says it can't read the CD drive.

I'm thinking my only option may be to put my secondary drive in a friend's pc, save my data from it, and then reinstall linux and grub on it.
Any other ideas?

Thanks.

-Chuckk

Run fixmbr from windows to write xp loader to MBR. That'll make windows bootable from harddrive again.

This will sound stupid, but this will involve a bootable CD, right? I will go home and try it, but I couldn't use the cd before...
Is it possible to change MBR from BIOS? I can access BIOS, btw.

When you re-partioned the Linux drive, you lost the config file that grub looks for.

To fix the mbr so windows works, you need the installation CD. If it wont read that CD on boot-up, then check the bios settings for booting from CD. If all of this is OK, then you may have bad CD or bad drive.

What exactly is happening when you try to boot from CD??

Well, this time it worked. I guess I did something wrong before. I ran fixmbr and my system is up and running again!

bigrigdriver, you're a saint. Thanks!

-Chuckk