accidentally reset master boot record
 

I'm a newbie, so forgive me for my stupidity. I bought a second hard drive and had installed RedHat 7.2 on it. I used to have a duel boot screen where I picked which OS to start up with. About 6 months after I installed Linux, I got an error message (in windows ) saying that something (possibly a virus) had changed my master boot record and asked if I wanted to ignore the change or restore it to the previous master boot record. I clicked restore and it restored it to the point before I had installed linux and set up my second hard drive. Is there any way to fix it back without reinstalling the software and reformatting the second hard drive?

If you can boot that second drive, hopefully with a Linux boot disk that you made during install, then its easy. Just use that to boot into linux, and then re-run the boot loader. Either from the command line with: /sbin/lilo, or /sbin/grub (depending on the boot loader).

If you don't have the boot disk, use an install CD and boot with that. Ignore the graphical cute install crap and hit ctrl+F2+alt and you've got a shell. Then you have to mount the Linux drive's root partition. Assuming its the second hard drive on the first IDE controller and that the root partition, / is the first partition:

mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt

chroot /mnt

Now you've mounted the Linux drive and switched to it being your root partition. Now you should be able to re-run the boot loader. It'll write the boot loader back to whatever it was.

Cheers,

Finegan

LOL nice Finegan :D
I like my Slack install disk without all these cuty crappy GUI

With RedHat 7.2 you'll probably want to install GRUB, so follow Finegan's instructions, then run the command grub-install /dev/hd? where /dev/hd? is the hard drive whose Master Boot Record you want GRUB to be installed on.