forgot to make partition bootable
 

lol.. whoops.

last night i reinstalled ubuntu (for X-teenth time) and forgot to set the root partition's bootable flag.. i finally rebooted my computer after being in xp for awhile and realized linux wont boot.

both xp pro and linux are on the same HD.

can i fix this somehow? can i boot with the cd and somehow log into my install and edit the grub file or something (ok now im just pretending i know what im talking about)..

if i cant get it to work, ill just delete the partition and reinstall (for X-teenth++ time), which is what iv done everytime iv ran into a problem with linux :mad:

anyways..
any help appreciated

I'm only answering cause you're on 0 replies, but I use LILO with Slack
and you don't need any bootable partitions at all.

oh.. so your replying out of spite then, eh? lol :P

could anyone help me?

use a live cd and cfdisk

Yeah, like the guy above said, use a live CD distro, or a bootdisk if you made one, get into an OS of some sort and run fdisk (or cfdisk) and set the partition to be bootable (I think that's also called 'active', but I'm not sure).

is there a way i can do this from within windows? ie, will something like partition magic be able to set a certain partition bootable (if anyone knows from experiance)

From (bad) experience Parttion Magic did not help me booting anything. Just f****d up the whole thing.

Please forgive my being rude tonight.

ok.. well i just deleted the partition and installed it again while iwas eating dinner

yay to avoiding solving problems

:mad:

Well it's a shame you're impatient because I think even windows fdisk can set a partition as bootable.

i went to command line and typed fdisk and it gave error saying cant find or whatever ms' error msg is

yes.. figured that would be easiest thing to do (use fdisk in windows) but it didnt work so i started over once again. i didnt want to waste time burning and downloading a live cd when i didnt have anything important on my ubuntu install anyways

ok.. i reinstalled ubuntu AGAIN :scratch:

and have the same problem.. its not booting to linux. i downloaded DSL and booted to that and used cfdisk and made the linux partition (the root / partition, not home or swap) bootable and turned my MS partition's bootable flag off. it then just gave error that no bootable media found, or something similar. so i just set it back to normal and im back in windows again.

what else can i try?

well i removed it all together.. again.. and put slack 10 on.