Please help! Windows won't boot from grub.

nano · 05-22-2004, 02:15 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by rberry88
The people that are having problems, why don't you post your partition scheme here (and computer specs) so the rest of us could see if we spot any problems to try to help.
rberry88

mmmm Well, I don't have that problem, anyway here is my info:

---primary partition---
hda1 Fat32 WinXP
---extented partition---
hda5 Fat32 Personal Data
hda6 SWAP
hda7 ext3 /
hda8 ext3 /home

The Linux partitions were created with PartitionMagic 8.

OSes that were installed previously
a. Fedora Core 1 (Grub & Kernel 2.4)
b. Mandrake 10 Community (Lilo & Kernel 2.6.?)
c. Fedora Core 2 (Grub & Kernel 2.6.?) [now]

During the manual partition, the "SWAP" and "/" partitions were formatted.

Until now it is booting fine, and I hope it keep working.

Don't know if this help...

rberry88 · 05-22-2004, 09:18 AM

@nano,

I'm not sure what you are asking, your partition scheme looks fine and as long as its working you should be ok. If you are having some kind of problems, I must have missed it.

@Bambino

Good to hear that its working again. I had a feeling it was simply a Grub syntax error since you were able to boot the Win partition by itself.

rberry88

sevenn · 05-22-2004, 09:37 AM

errr ok this bug happens even if the partitions are on different HDs.. i think

So guys can u confirm that this bug does NOT happen if i DONT install any bootloader so i leave the default boot as win2k AND i boot linux only with a boot floppy?
and maybe can u explain me how to have a boot like that ?

I mean nothing on MBRs and same boot as win2k's but if i put the fc2 boot floppy it loads fc2..

I hope that this bug is related to the boot loader and not to the install process...i'd like to install this distro but i CANT really lose my win2k partition
tnx everybody

Flak Pyro · 05-22-2004, 08:58 PM

I think the bug is releated to how Anaconda handles partition creation, so as long as you dont create/modify any partitions you should be fine. If you need to create any try using Mandrake Move's "Disk Drake" it is very user friendly, or use partition magic you have it.

windeath · 05-23-2004, 02:13 AM

Well let me just say that this has caused HUGE problems in my little home in Australia.

Not only do I no lon ger have a Windows partition, any Linux at all, but a VERY ANNOYED family. I have wiped all my sons photos (18 months worth) yes yes I know didn't you back them. I'm in IT I never said I practice what I preach.

Anyway while I'm still in the sh*t I may as well continue fiddling until I get it going.

Question. I have installed WinXP on partition 1 of my 80GB. I have now installed FC1 with these specs hda5 is a 110mb /boot, hda6 7000mb for /, and hda7 1024mb for swap. I am now going to install FC2 onto the last part of the drive using hda8 for /boot again 110mb and hda9 for / again 7000mb, I will share hda7 for the swap.

Then if all goes well point Grub (from FC1 install) to the newly installed FC2.

What do you think?

Ed-MtnBiker · 05-23-2004, 03:05 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by windeath
Well let me just say that this has caused HUGE problems in my little home in Australia.

Not only do I no lon ger have a Windows partition, any Linux at all, but a VERY ANNOYED family. I have wiped all my sons photos (18 months worth) yes yes I know didn't you back them. I'm in IT I never said I practice what I preach.

Anyway while I'm still in the sh*t I may as well continue fiddling until I get it going.

Read through the lower portions of bug 115980, there's some suggestions on recovering the partition table and restoring access to the data. The partition is fine, its just that the partition table is FUBARed. (and, not easy to get back, but some reports are successful.)

Best of luck getting back to your data, sorry for the misfortune.

sevenn · 05-23-2004, 06:19 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Flak Pyro
I think the bug is releated to how Anaconda handles partition creation, so as long as you dont create/modify any partitions you should be fine. If you need to create any try using Mandrake Move's "Disk Drake" it is very user friendly, or use partition magic you have it.

ok tnx i'll try this way

windeath · 05-23-2004, 07:08 AM

Yippee!!!!!! I changed the BIOS to LBA for HDD reformatted the entire drive, installed crappy XP then FC2 with that annoying BLOODY error, and all is now well in the world.

I'm sorry I can't be of any further help as I basically did what was suggested in the bugzilla link, change and prey I think it says.

benjithegreat98 · 05-23-2004, 01:30 PM

I had the dual boot problem and fixed it with these instructions from the bugzilla site

Quote:

Additional Comment #59 From Zhelyazko Chobantonov on 2004-05-21 11:39 -------

i found solution try this:
sfdisk -d /dev/hda > temp.txt
vi temp.txt and remove line up to comment line (Exeption explanation
message)
then:
cat temp.txt | sfdisk --no-reread -H255 /dev/hda

After I did that everything worked as it should.

Flak Pyro · 05-23-2004, 01:42 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by benjithegreat98
I had the dual boot problem and fixed it with these instructions from the bugzilla site

After I did that everything worked as it should.

Could you explain that a little better? I read that on bugzilla and didnt really understand what that exactly did.

benjithegreat98 · 05-23-2004, 01:53 PM

Yeah, sure

Open a terminal. Log in as root using the su command.
Now type in /sbin/sfdisk -d /dev/hda > temp.txt
This creates a file temp.txt that holds the info you want. You first need to edit it, though.
Using your favorite editor remove any commented lines (the ones that begin w/ a pound sign (#)).
Next issure the command cat temp.txt | /sbin/sfdisk --no-reread -H255 /dev/hda

You'll probably get errors that say you need to reboot before you can do it, but it worked for me even with the error.

Crashed_Again · 05-23-2004, 04:17 PM

Does this issue effect dual boot Linux machines? I have Redhat 9.0 on my first hard drive and Gentoo on the second and I wanted to upgrade to FC2 but now I'm a little nervous. RedHat currently maintains grub. Will I have any issues with this?

Also, I have dual boot on my laptop XP and RedHat 9.0. They are on one disk. Will I run into this bug on my laptop or is it just effecting installs with 2 seperate hard drives?

benjithegreat98 · 05-23-2004, 06:59 PM

This won't affect your dual linux machine as far as I have read. It will effect your notebook. It happened to me and I have xp and FC on a single drive with a separate data drive (for occations like this). If you have something to loose by Windows XP disappearing then I would be cautious.... I didn't know about this bug until after I installed. While I was installing there was a warning before reading the partitioning data. If you install and see this then abort.

It is recoverable in some instances. Can't guarentee all instances. So like I said above.... If you have something to loose then beware.

codytaylor · 05-28-2004, 07:09 PM

I don't think it's just the repartitioning. I had the partitions already made and FC2 already installed, and everything was working fine for several days..... Then I finally decided to boot the new Fedora (had been using and booting XP just fine in the meantime) and only when I used GRUB and actually booted it did it destroy my windows.

So be careful, because I don't think it's the repartitioning and installation that's really the problem.

Kristijan · 06-04-2004, 04:05 AM

Following http://www.fedorazine.com/content/view/191/38/ , this is how far I got...

Since sfdisk -d /dev/hda does not produce any errors, I piped it in the one command.

Code:

[root@neo root]# sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread --force -H255 /dev/hda 
Warning: HDIO_GETGEO says that there are 16 heads 
 
Disk /dev/hda: 155061 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track 
Old situation: 
Warning: The partition table looks like it was made 
  for C/H/S=*/16/63 (instead of 155061/255/63). 
For this listing I'll assume that geometry. 
Units = cylinders of 516096 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0 
 
   Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System 
/dev/hda1          0+  20804   20805-  10485688+   7  HPFS/NTFS 
/dev/hda2   *  20805  155060  134256   67665024   83  Linux 
/dev/hda3          0       -       0          0    0  Empty 
/dev/hda4          0       -       0          0    0  Empty 
New situation: 
Units = sectors of 512 bytes, counting from 0 
 
   Device Boot    Start       End   #sectors  Id  System 
/dev/hda1            63  20971439   20971377   7  HPFS/NTFS 
/dev/hda2   *  20971440 156301487  135330048  83  Linux 
/dev/hda3             0         -          0   0  Empty 
/dev/hda4             0         -          0   0  Empty 
Warning: partition 1 does not end at a cylinder boundary 
Successfully wrote the new partition table 
 
Re-reading the partition table ... 
BLKRRPART: Device or resource busy 
The command to re-read the partition table failed 
Reboot your system now, before using mkfs 
 
If you created or changed a DOS partition, /dev/foo7, say, then use dd(1) 
to zero the first 512 bytes:  dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/foo7 bs=512 count=1 
(See fdisk(8).)

I'm really not sure whats going on here, I did try and reboot, but I still get the same chainload error.