I've got a big problem and not sure how to fix it. I have Win XP and used partition Magic to create partition for Linux just so I could try it out, play around. Did so over the last couple of months, but had to select each time whether to go to XP or Redhat each time booted up or else it went automatically to Redhat, so I decided to get rid of Redhat. I repartitioned and got rid of Redhat, but now every time my computer reboots, it still just sticks with the text "GRUB -" and there's no way to get out of it. I tried to use restore disks, but ended up with the same problem. Where is my PC going to find that it should be loading GRUB still? I've tried looking in the BIOS but nothing there. Can anyone help? Thanks!

Did you install GRUB on the MBR (master boot record)? If so you'll need to find a Win98 boot floppy and fix the MBR.

I think the dos command to repair that would be:

fdisk /mbr

Not sure if I had installed over mbr or not, but will try to find out. Figured I'd just wing the installation and whatever happened, figured I could fix. Guess I figured wrong, eh?

If there is no bootable disk or cd in your box, then it is in the mbr

boot with DOS or WIN bootdisk and type "fdisk /mbr"

But what if fdisk /mbr doesn't work? Any suggestions....

Yes, you can boot you XP disk and go into repair mode, from there you can restore the mbr. An other option would be to reinstall redhat and set XP as the default boot OS instead of redhat.

Now there's a reason not to install into the MBR! I install lilo on my /boot partition and make that partition bootable in cfdisk. That can save you from this kind of mbr-troubles.

The disk doesn't show any partitions at all, trying to boot, I get compressed image at block 0. There is no OS on the disk and fdisk /mbr isn't working.

Help, I'm not in the habit of giving up on drives.

Thanks and Happy Holidays

TC