installing grub, or other boot loader, after XP reinstall.
 

hi all. I have, once again, gone through a windowsXP reinstallation that has hosed my grub MBR. I know that I can reinstall grub on my window mbr but I would like to eliminate this problem for the future. I have my debian-amd64 distro installed on a separate hard drive and would like to, if possible, install grub on the linux hard drive instead of the windowsXP hard drive. I'm not sure if or how this could be done, especially since at the moment I don't have access to the linux distro at all. Is there any way that I can install grub, or any other boot manager, directly to my linux drive that has none? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanx

Hi

Your computer will boot from the first partition on the first hard drive unless you enable a different drive to boot first in the BIOS. With that you will need a bootloader on you MBR or set your BIOS to boot from the second hard disk, which you could install grub to and configure it to boot Windows also.

Hope this helps

And by the way,WELCOME TO LQ!

Bob

Thanks Bob, happy to be here. On my BIOS boot screen I can press escape and choose any drive in my system to boot from. When I choose my Linux drive the systems stops at the "verifying DMI pool" prompt. I believe that this is from there being no MBR on the linux drive. That's the hurdle that I need to get over. Is there a way for me to put a boot loader on the linux drive without any outside access to it other than through windows(I do have access to the drive through windows, its drive "L" in my windows explorer. I can't remember what program I used to make it available or why). I was thinking maybe a liveCD but I wouldn't know where to start. In the ancient words of Leeloo "please help".

If you have one of the Linux Rescue CDs (several are available for downloading), boot from one of them and create a vfat formatted GRUB boot disk. (See here for a brief walk-through.) Use the mkfs.vfat or mkfs.msdos command to format the floppy (or just use a blank, pre-formatted one). That's so you can edit the /boot/grub/grub.conf file in either XP or Linux to boot your Linux system in addition to your XP system.

Then the next time you reinstall Windows, or you have boot problems for some other reason, you'll be able to get to your Linux system, where you should be able to run /sbin/grub-install to fix your MBR problem.