Grub & Windows XP
 

Hi all,

I'm a complete newbie to Linux and anything related to it, so please be gentle!!

I have a windows xp tablet (Sumo Technologies), and had grub installed.

Now this machine, never had Linux installed in any shape or form, only grub which then booted into windows xp.

I made an image of the hdd (sector by sector) way back in july using acronis 2016, and again last night. I've attempted to restore both images, and both have restored successfully, but when I go to boot the tablet, I get a message saying "Grub" on a black screen (basically a dos screen).

Does anyone know how I get around this and get it booting back to windows ?

Any help, greatly appreciated.


Thanks

G

Hi, fantom, and welcome to LQ.

Is "Grub" the only word that appears? If not, can you paste here exactly what the screen says?

When you say that you had Grub installed, do you mean that it was already installed when you got the tablet?

Hi hydrurga,

Thanks for your reply.

There is nothing else on screen except the word 'Grub'.

There is no prompt at it. By that I mean you cannot type anything and the enter key does nothing.

It rather sounds like Grub has crashed.

First, you'll need to reinstall Grub, after checking the integrity of the filesystem on that partition. I hope that you copied-down what the settings were.

If not, the instructions for booting Windows-XP are well documented: Grub must pass control to the Windows loader, which IIRC is NTLDR.SYS. Follow the published setup-directions, and they will work.

sundialsvcs - short answer to writing down settings, is no.

Do you have a link to well documented notes on installation or do they come with Grub ? (I've never used or installed grub)

Anyone recommend hdd imaging software that when restored won't mess grub up ?

fantom,

Welcome to LQ.

For imaging software, Redo Backup works fine for me:
http://redobackup.org/

It works on both Windows & Linux. The restored image will not affect grub.

Thanks all for your input so far.

Now for a daft question! I've downloaded the latest grub, is just a matter now of burning it to cd and installing like a normal program or is it not as simple as that??

You need to configure the grub bootloader.
Configure means.
Reading the manual
See what you have on your box
set it up than.

Most of the time someone else has already asked the same question. and there is an example in a wiki on "how to boot spywareXP"

I want to kindly ask you to read a wiki / blog or something similar which explains on howto setup SPYWAREXP and the GRUB bootloader.

--

I would not consider ACRONIS a decent backup solution.
The backup files are in a proprietary file which can not be accessed with maybe a livecd from acronis or a working Windows..

Also acronis did not work here for several use cases.

With every harddrive i buy i get a fishy windows only backup solution. i have 3 acronis licenses and two other noname windows only backup licenses.

Please do not use spyware95 newbie terms like crashed. There is no crash for grub.

the loosest issue which comes similar is a kernel oops.

bootloaders have usually stages. they do as instructed and it is obvious that something is not correctly configured.

also note:

the words

tablet (indicates maybe one of these: not usual setup, weird memory sections, not usual harddrives, not usual Bios, if you can say bios, more usual some sort of firmware, which does not something standardized)

windows xp (indicates very old)

no name manufacturer (indicates also problematic)

which indicates not a usual setup.

--

sounds like "DISK DESTROYER", aka dd.

Most guys forget the madness of firmware on "tablet" like "tablet computers". How supermarket computer sellers like MEDION names these in Germany and Austria. "Tablet Computers" LOL

I would not be surprised when the firmware needs some fishy setup next to the disk layout.

When you are lucky you have just to fix the bootloader, when it is really one of grub1 or grub2 bootloaders.

--

@@ fantom

Please post exact

type of hardware. e.g. ASUS G75VW-T1124V (90N2VL152N3272VL151)
any other stuff which give more details on what it really is

saying tablet with windows xp can be so many products. like saying samsung tablet, samsung has every month a new tablet

--

Also post contents of bootsection, grub.cfg when it is really a grub bootloader

also

output of lsblk

@_roman_,

Is this not the Newbie forum ?

Not everyone that comes here has much (if any) technical knowledge, you need to think about the "newbies" reading this. Also, I believe members have every right to use whatever terms they think are appropriate. (unless it breaks LQ rules of course)

From which site did you download Grub and which Grub?
If you have an old unsupported installation of xp and the Grub bootloader has been on it, then it is probably Grub Legacy. If you downloaded the latest Grub it is Grub2 and there are very major differences between the two bootloaders in how they are configured.

That would imply that you have had this machine since it was new or you would not know it never had Linux. Although obviously, Grub can be installed to chainload to a windows OS, it is extremely unusual. Did you install this original Grub?

You might give some details on the reason for restoring the image(s) you created. Did you original xp fail? Did you restore to another partition?

To add to this _roman_,

Using the terms spyware95 and spywarexp as part of just about every post you make is not appropriate. This is a Linux forum. If you wish to discuss Windows topics, keep those in the General forum.

This is the second time I've had to note your overuse of a term within threads. Continue to do so and your posting privileges can be affected.

Just two examples of usage of the term "crash" in modern *nix like OS/distribution documentation.
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Kernel_Crash_Dumps
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books...debug-gdb.html

And a search of the Linux kernel git repository is also quite telling: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/se...&q=crash&type=

Ok,so it appears that offence has been taken to the word crash.

What can I say.... it doesn't load/it doesn't boot/it displays nothing only 'grub' on the screen. Does that clear the crash issue up?

The device in question is a handheld/tablet manufactured by sumo technologies, running. Windows xp.

Yes it's old, but hey you have to work with what you have.

The sumo technologies device (I'm going to call a 'tablet'), is not mine. I was trying to fix an issue for the owner.

The owner does not know windows, Linux, dos or any other operating system you can to mention.

He does know that it has windows on it and you double tap/click an icon to load a program, that is the extent of his knowledge!

So in July I made an image of the hdd using acronis not realising it doesn't like grub/Linux ( I've learnt hat now).

I made another image a few nights ago again with acronis and then restored back the original image I had made. This is where I learned it doesn't like grub/Linux.

Now the tablet is about 13/14 yrs old and was working fine until it developed a fault in a database belonging to a program being run on it. Said program Is out of date, but it does what it says on the tin until it stopped working. Despite several attempts to fix he db it was unfixable so my thoughts were revert back to july image and then update, but hey ho that didn't work.


Yes it was grub 2 I downloaded, and it was got by using a well
Known search enginee starting with g!

Now reading the posts above I probably need a really old version of grub to fix this.

If it is of any help I can probably extract the grub partition from the image and see if there is anything thing there that will help someone help me.

The novice that I am had never heard of grub until recently,

Read the manual - certainly I'll read over it if some kind soul will post it up or a direct link to it.

Again, some stuff may be clear as day to you having Linux knowledge but to me means nothing.


If after reading all of the above you can still help and are willing to help a Linux/grub novice then please post my next step.

If you require further information then please ask.

If not, thanks for taking the time to read all of this.

Ps if there are any typing mistakes etc I apologise as I'm using my phones browser to access the forum and reply to this thread.

That's not your fault fantom, just ignore it. Don't even worry about it.

If you want to restore Windows XP and make it boot;

You need to restore the Windows XP boot sector. This should remove GRUB.

The following link may help: https://neosmart.net/wiki/fix-mbr/