Hi,
I have a problem booting my laptop. I currently have xubuntu 8.10 dual booted with windows XP i then decided to try xubuntu 9.04 by putting it on to a USB flash drive using the setup file xu904p.exe and the iso file for xubuntu 9.04. Everything seemed to go fine except when i went to reboot i got a blank screen nad that was it. I assume the MBR has been overwritten/corupted. I can boot into windows if i use Gparted and select the 'boot from 1st partition' option of Gparted but cant seem to boot into Xubuntu using any of the other options.

If i try to boot (using Gparted) using the 'Boot MBR on first hard drive' option i get teh following:

rootnoverify (HD0)
chainloader +1

Then nothing happens. I assume there must be a command that i can use under Gparted to boot xubuntu. However i still have teh problem of how to fix the MBR to dual boot the two systems again.

I had this problem once in the past and got around it buy reinstalling linux as this writes a new MBR but not to keen to do this. Another option would be just to upgrade to Xubuntu 9.04 but do i need ot get access to old system to do this or could i do it from a live CD.

Any help would be much apreciated as i mostly use Xubuntu now.

Cheers.

You can install GRUB from any Linux Live CD.

I'm back---I had to check something.....

Running from a live CD, get into a terminal (command line) and enter "fdisk -l" to confirm the disk partitions. Let's assume you have one drive and you want to install GRUB on /dev/sda, and the grub config files (including menu.lst) are on /dev/sda1.

enter "grub" to start the GRUB shell
enter "root (hd0,0)" ---GRUB should confirm that it finds a filesystem there.
enter "setup (hd0)"
reboot

If you have a complex setup with multiple drives, you may have to experiment a bit. The trick is to know what the drive/partition order will be when the system boots from hard drive. For more help, post your complete configuration--number and type of drives, etc.

Note that grub numbering starts from zero, so drive 1, partition 1 is "hd0,0"

Hi Pixellany,
It worked perfectly, so many thanks for that. It is also usefull information to know for the future, all i need to know now is why installing a live .iso to a usb flash drive should have over written the MBR in the first place so that i dont have the same problem agian although at least i can fix it now. Agian, many thanks.

Cheers.