Grub and Windows XP

metalx1000 · 09-08-2006, 04:09 PM

Hello,

I've have a duel boot on my laptop of knoppix and windows XP on my laptop for the past month or two and about an hour ago I screwed it up.

I was messing with the grub command and now when I get the Grub boot menu I still have the option to boot to Linux or Windows but when I select Windows it quickly flashes the following.

Quote:

Booting 'windows 2K/XP/2003(hda1)'
Chain load (hd0,0)+1
Grub loading stage2...

And that's not the worst of it. When I do boot to linux or to one of my liveCD's the windows partion shows up (hda1) but when I try to mount it I get the following message

Quote:

Could not mount device.
The reported error was:
Failed to startup volume : Invalid argument
Couldn't mount device '/dev/hda1' : Invalid argument
Mount failed.

I could use some help.
Thanks

masonm · 09-08-2006, 04:14 PM

What do you mean by messing around with the grub command?

You may need to reinstall grub if you really borked it. I'm assuming you made no changes to menu.lst?

metalx1000 · 09-08-2006, 04:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by masonm

What do you mean by messing around with the grub command?

You may need to reinstall grub if you really borked it. I'm assuming you made no changes to menu.lst?

Well every once and a while when I selected my Linux partion it would get an error and not boot. The way I got around this was by booting a liveCD and mounting that partion. Then next time I rebooted my linux partion would boot just fine.

This would happen every week or so, and as you can imagine, this was a major pain in the butt.

So I read on upgrading my verion on Grub. I thought it would fix my problem, but what ever I did screwed up my windows partion.

I don't remember what I typed excatly, but it was something like

Code:

grub
setup (hd0,0)

homey · 09-08-2006, 06:25 PM

Quote:

setup (hd0,0)

Yep, that will mess things up as that is your windows partition. Should have been setup (hd0) .

Here's my notes on that from long ago. Can't remember who wrote this.

Code:

If you mistakenly install GRUB onto another partition on your hard drive instead of the MBR (for example, the command 'grub-install /dev/hda1' writes the GRUB stage1 to the first partition on the hard drive hda... in my case this was my Windows partition.

1.Zero out MBR. (but not all of it!) You need to use 'dd' to erase the MBR.
Run the  command: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1
Why the 'bs=446'? Because the rest of your MBR holds the partition table for the drive... which you do not want to destroy. (note how 'hda' in this context refers to the MBR where, in general, 'hda' is the first hard drive in your system) 

2.Zero out the boot sector of the Windows partition.
Run the  command: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1
This erases the boot sector of the first partition on hda.

3.Re-write a Windows MBR. You'll need to boot into DOS with your trusty Windows boot disk and type: fdisk /mbr

4.Copy Windows system files to boot sector of Windows partition.
Type: sys a: c:
Which tells DOS to copy the system files from a: to the boot sector of c:.

5.At this point your computer should be able to reboot into Windows as if you just had Windows installed. Try it by rebooting.

6.If all has gone well, you can reinstall GRUB.

Don't forget setup (hd0)

masonm · 09-08-2006, 06:48 PM

Yeah, you installed grub to the windows partition. You'll need to rerun it to hd0 after cleaning up the mess as indicated in the above post.

What distro are you using anyway?

metalx1000 · 09-09-2006, 07:56 AM

Thanks for the help so far.

I've tried what you've told me but I do not have a floppy drive on my laptop.
I tried my win98 and Bootable DOS CD I download. I looking for my winXP CD right now. So far the'sys a: c:' command did not work (Bad command of file name). If you have any suggestions I would be very greatful.

homey · 09-09-2006, 08:17 AM

Quote:

So far the'sys a: c:'

If you are booted into a cdrom, a: is going to be something else .

metalx1000 · 09-09-2006, 08:23 AM

I know that. The one CD did boot the CD as the A: drive. and on the win98 CD I use D:

metalx1000 · 09-09-2006, 08:38 AM

I finally found a DOs 6.22 .ISO image and loaded that. The command 'SYS' works, but the c: is just unreconized. I only had a few thing on it that I did have backed up, so I'm just going to start from scratch. Thanks for all the help.