Debian netinstall
 

the install went fine, I chose to install grub to a floppy instead of the hdd. I also have win xp home on this hdd. i wanted to be able to start up and go into xp and only go into debian when the floppy was inserted. grub installed fine to the floppy and boots either xp or deb. but i get an os load error when booting from the hdd into xp. what happened? i did a net install with the 2.6 kernel, chose desktop only for the extra packages and i dont remember the ftp site i chose to download from.

thanks for any help. need more info just ask!

What the exact error do you have? Or we should know it with our extasence abilities?

No clues from anyone on this?

Did you install grub to the hard drive? As noted above, you should post the error you received.

Where in TX are you? Maybe there's a LUG nearby.

And please, answer the follow-up Q's or we may not [be able] to help you.

excuse me for not being able to get back to this. I have been working like two jobs.:) umm I have answered the questions in my original post. so here it is again did a net install of debian to a single hard drive with a partition for xp at the begining and a partition for debian w/ a swap partition. when asked to install grub i installed to a floppy. then when removing the floppy and booting the computer it stops and says os load error. why?????:confused:

i have already come up with a solution fix the broken boot but i want to know why it screwed up the windows boot sector on the hdd it should not have even touched it. to resolve the prob. i installed grub to the boot sector on the hdd ( which i didnt want to do ) and set it to default to winxp


would appreciate any ideas why that happened

It sounds like the Debian installer tried to an MBR install (& a defective one at that) in addition to the floppy as you requested.

Was it an Etch install? I haven't done one of those yet. I don't recall any trouble like this w/ Sarge, but then I've never asked for a boot floppy.

See if your local LUG can help.

yes that does appear to be what happened. but i fail to see why. and it was sarge. and for some reason not to be discussed here xp wont fix the MBR. oh well no worries.

Usually grub shouldn't have a problem occupying the MBR. At least it didn't for me with NT way back when I used to run a dual-boot. Grub is pretty platform independant and flexible. For NT, and probably for XP as well, it's usually matter of having it chain load them.

You should probably reference the grub docs and any multi-boot how-tos on the net. They contain some good details that you need.

Your error message may be the result of not having the existance of a section for chain loading XP in your menu.lst. Or perhaps, for some reason, the section isn't setup right. I've never set it up to require floppy to boot(I don't like such an arrangement considering the failure rate of floppies). So it's only my guess that there isn't the need of a chainloading section in the menu.lst if your setup for floppy booting like how you were after.

My guess is that the mbr probably got overwritten somehow to contain grub, but that the installer didn't update the menu.lst to chainload XP due to being set up with the assumption that you'll be booting linux with floppy. The idea that you were going for was to have the floppy in when you boot Linux, and you don't have the floppy in when you want to boot XP so that XP's MBR code bootstraps XP and the floppy bootstraps Linux. Obviously something is off somewhere. My guess is that it is some how setup somewhere in between the two types of methods (floppy and chainloading setup) and it's just a matter of rectifying the menu.lst or overwriting the MBR with XP version of MBR code. In other words, if you have Grub's MBR code in the MBR, then you have to set up the menu.lst to chainload XP if you want to be able to boot it (technically you don't have to since you can use the grub shell to boot it, but that is impractical. However, it may be practical to type in all the grub commands to test out and see if you can get XP to bootstrap properly. Then you will know what you'll need to do to the menu.lst).

One thing I would check first and foremost just to rule it out as any sort of interference, is how you have your booting option in your BIOS.

So, in terms of my sig. block, we are untieing the knot for the fun or education of it. Unfortunately, in getting things to "just work" (tm:)), you have overwritten the MBR & can no longer re-create the original problem w/o re-installing Sarge -- something you probably don't want to do. FWIW, I think PingFloyd's diagnosis is right.


Do you still want the MBR to go direct to XP?
If so, does your Linux boot floppy still work?


Who says we can't discuss that here? ;) I thought fixing M$PoSOS's is a favorite indoor sport around here. :)

so you are saying the boot from XP CD to recovery console and using the fixmbr command doesn't work ?

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/d...ns_fixmbr.mspx

Thanks everyone who responded.