Everything was working fine. I have XPand redhat9 on the same HDD and the dual boot was working fine.

IO added a second HDD and now instead of grub loading giving me the choice of which OS to boot, it just keeps saying GRUB GRUB GRUB over and over again, i cannot type anything.

I chacked and yes the new HDD is set to slave.

"IO added a second HDD and now instead of grub loading giving me the choice of which OS to boot, it just keeps saying GRUB GRUB GRUB over and over again, i cannot type anything."

I think that the BIOS is reading the MBR over and over. This could be either a hardware/BIOS problem or perhaps the MBR is screwed up.

If it is a screwed up MBR then you could try using a rescue CD to boot into Red Hat. Inspect grub.conf and if everything is OK then run grub-install to recreate the MBR.

To test if this is a hardware problem you could disconnect the new hard drive and see if the problem goes away.

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Steve Stites

I disconnected the second drive. Its not a hardware problem. When the second drive is disconnected grub loades.

Now it doesnt load XP, when i select in grub it doesnt go to windows it just does nothing and the time goes back to 20 seconds.

How do i format just the windwos partition, and the reinstall it without getting rid of linux?

I looked at the grub code and i cant see anything wrong with grub.conf

Any help would be much apreciated.

"How do i format just the windwos partition, and the reinstall it without getting rid of linux?"

The only way that installing Windows will affect Linux is that Windows will take over the MBR and you cannot then boot Linux. So before you install Windows make yourself a boot floppy for Linux and make sure it works. You can then use the boot floppy to get into Linux no matter what Windows does to the MBR. After you install Windows then boot into Linux and set the MBR back the way that you want it.

I know very little about installing Windows. Other than the MBR the only thing to do is to not allow Windows to touch the partition table and not allow it to format any partition other than the one that Windows is being installed to.

Can some one who is familiar with Windows installs add anything to what I said?

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Steve Stites

I think that ive fixed windows. The only problem now is that i cannot try it until grub is either taken away or fixed. How do i take away grub, and then reinstall it again.

Would it work if i just delete the /boot partition

Or would this hurt my linux installation

"Would it work if i just delete the /boot partition

Or would this hurt my linux installation"

Deleting the /boot partition will destroy Linux.

"The only problem now is that i cannot try it until grub is either taken away or fixed. How do i take away grub, and then reinstall it again."

You fix grub by booting into your Linux system, fixing grub by editing your grub.conf file, and then running the grub-install command to rewrite grub to the MBR.

To boot into your Red Hat system boot the Red Hat install CD into rescue mode. When you get a command prompt then issue the following commands. I am assuming that your Red Hat partition is /dev/hda3 and that you have an ext3 file system. Adjust these commands if my assumptions are wrong:

mkdir /pogo
mount -t ext3 /dev/hda3 /pogo
chroot /pogo

Then edit /boot/grub/grub.conf if it is set up incorrectly.

Then issue this command:
grub-install

___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

Steve Stites

why all the complication?
go into win XP recovery console and type in fixboot /mbr or fixmbr and then fixboot. then you can go into linux and reinstall grub with grub-install!