boot issues on Dell laptop
 

Hello again,

I'm stuck with this thing... it's a long story i think too plz help if you can...

1) I have a Dell Latitude D510 I got from my college.

2) I installed Ubuntu 6.06 LTS... Install went fine.

3) Rebooted PC, started up Ubuntu from the partition I set it on. Loaded and ran fine.

4) Rebooted PC again, started Windows WHILE AT HOME, everything went fine.

5) Shut down PC for the night...

6) Brought it into the college, loaded WinXP fine ETC.

7) Rebooted PC, THIS IS WERE IT HITS THE FAN...
After the BIOS is displayed and loads fine, I get a GLIMPSE of "Loading GRUB 1.5" (or something to that effect). Then the whole system crashes and reboots. Then repeats again with the crashing of GRUB.

The ONLY way to get back into it is to re-install Ubuntu.

... From what I can tell, Windows XP tryies to overwrite the MBR whenever it connects to my college network...

I know I can restore the Win XP MBR by doing...
<drive>fdisk /mbr
...BUT I can't get that far because I can't use a bootdisk, because I don't have a floppy. I know I can get them from bootdisk.com but all there bootdisks are .exes to format a floppy (...again I don't have one).
I then created a basic CD with bootable DOS on it but it fails when trying to restore the MBR... AND Yes the NTFS partition is set as active.

......... I'm stuck. All I want to know is if LILO will handle this better or what I would like to do is use the WinXP bootload to boot both...

Any help or links to good guides would be great...

Thanks!

:S I dont think thats possible!
what kind a network are you connecting too?

use your ubuntu cd as a rescue disk, and reinstall grub with that. I am not sure that it will solve the problem, though.

grub gets re-installed when ubuntu is re-installed. it does the same thing as if i re-installed just grub (...and i did try installing just grub). SOMETHING on this network resets it... all i want is to change it back so i can mod the windows bootloader myself...

the bootdisk is to get me into DOS so I can use fdisk /mbr to reset the the WindowsXP based MBR.

-OR-

reset the MBR some other way.