i have a dual boot setup. would removing a drive (windows c) from fstab (using MCC) affect the windows bootup?

when I restarted today i get a "error loading operating system" (black screen with cursor). it doesnt even get to the os selection screen.

Removing a partition from fstab means that he partition will not be mounted by Linux when you boot Linux. It will have no effect on booting Windows.





That probably means that you do not have a valib Master Boot Record on the drive you are booting. Did you remove the drive containing your MBR? Did you rearrange the order of your drives? Did you rearrange the drive boot order in your BIOS?

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Steve Stites

EDIT: seems like I was late; sorry for duplicate information.

Modifying fstab doesn't affect booting other operating systems (unless they depend on the information in fstab for some reason, which isn't the case with Windows). You can mess up your partition mounting and thus proper operation of the operating system that uses that fstab file, but for Windows it's all the same what that file contains or if it even exists.

If you can't even get to your bootloader (the screen where you pick up which operating system to boot), the problem lies either in the bootloader configuration or before that (BIOS configuration, broken disks, ...) The message "error loading operating system" sounds to me like your BIOS was trying to look for your usual booting stuff in the wrong place; if this was not the case, you'd probably get the usual OS selection screen or at least a (bootloader-specific) error message instead. Do you maybe have more than one harddisk, in which case their order could have changed (which one is primary/booted off first) for example?

If you are positive you have not changed your bootloader (grub, lilo, ...) configuration and you really get the error before you are able to select any operating system to be booted, check your BIOS configuration and make sure it's set to look for bootable things in the correct drive; you may try changing the order if you have multiple drives, just write down the original order so you can restore it if the changes don't help. If you only have one harddisk, use a live-cd distribution of Linux (or other means) to verify that the disk is fine, the data is still on it and that it really does contain a bootloader (because if a bootloader was missing or corrupt, you could very well get that message you got).

No, see, that's the thing; I'd rebooted a number of times since installing 2009 (i had 2008.1 and did an install not an upgrade).

I always have to play with rw stuff on the "shared" drive which I had just finished.

I'd rebooted, confirmed everything was working and went to bed.

today, it just wont work :-(

the drive is fairly new too (< 6 months old)

Hmmm, ok. I guess it could be coincidence that it was working (allowing reboots and stuff last night) and then after going to bed it got dead??

Ok, I got to dos prompt but the "C:\" drive is actually the "shared "f"" drive. it's as if the C partition has gone away

Ok, FYI....

I loaded mandriva one, went into MCC, clicked on the "C partition", which was blank, clicked Create (picked ntfs-3g, /mnt/windows, let the system say "guessing C", closed out (without formatting), rebooted and.....


....wait for it.....


VOILA!!!! Dual boot loader is BACK!!!!

So, deleting it from Linux, DOES affect it at the base level.