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Old 01-22-2004, 10:50 PM   #1
leemoreau
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Registered: Jan 2004
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Angry GRUB gives a flashing cursor and freezes


Can someone please help me? I've used, Suse 8 and 9, Red Hat 8 and Fedora Core 1 dual booting on my Dell 8100 with Windows XP. I just installed RedHat 9 and used the same options I always use. However, when I boot up all I get is the words "GRUB _" with the _ flashing. I've tried reinstalling, changing boot loaders to lilo and everything but all that happens is I get this GRUB. I really need to get to my XP partition, but I don't want to use the recovery console to fix the MBR because sometimes that messes things up and it will say NTLOADER not found or whatever. Can someone please recommend what I should do to either get RedHat and XP working properly (fix the boot loader) or at least what I should do to erase the boot loader and only boot to XP? Thanks so much.
 
Old 01-23-2004, 01:42 AM   #2
spuzzzzzzz
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Registered: Sep 2003
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you installed LILO, but it still said GRUB? That suggests to me that LILO never made it as far as your MBR. I'm still relatively new to GRUB, but if you install LILO, edit your /etc/lilo.conf file, and then run (as root) "lilo -M" then that should replace the GRUB MBR with a LILO MBR. (Maybe you should uninstall GRUB). Failing that, you could post up your /boot/grub/grub.conf file for general inspection.
 
Old 01-23-2004, 06:01 PM   #3
Thymox
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It sounds like you originally had GRUB installed into your MBR and now the bootloaders are installing into the boot sector of your partition. Since GRUB is still in your MBR it is looking for booting information (its config file) which no longer exists You could try booting from your install CD into rescue mode, and make sure that the new bootloader is installed in the correct place.

If you run into problems, you can try an alternative bootloader, such as XOSL to boot from so you can fix things.
 
Old 02-08-2004, 01:24 PM   #4
leemoreau
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I solved my problem, thought I'd post how incase anyone else experiences this. It was something to do like previously stated with too many things installed to MBR, boot partition etc. I just had to boot to the XP CD and goto recovery console and run fixmbr and fixboot then problem was solved.
 
Old 12-30-2004, 06:59 AM   #5
Raafi
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Registered: Dec 2004
Location: New Jersey
Distribution: Fedora 36
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i recently purchased the fedora core, on my windows xp

but i do not have a windows xp disc to work from

is there a solution for me?

right now, all i see is GRUB and the blinking "_"

of course, i am not on my computer, its blinking at me
 
  


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