Hi everyone,

I had a dual boot with WinXP / RedHat9 and grub (the standard setup when installing Windows first and then RedHat). But, then I reinstalled WinXP and probably overwrote the MBR. I don't know how to recover the MBR.

If go into the rescue mode (by booting from RH CDs) my root partition is mounted under /mnt/sysimage so the Linux is still there.

If I go into the interactive setup and tried to update the existing linux partition on /dev/hda3 and get an error message: "can't enable swap partition /dev/hda3"

If boot from a RH boot disk, I get the syslinux boot prompt and if:
- I press enter and go with the default I get "kernel panic. try passing on init= to kernel"
- 'Linux -boot=/dev/hda -root=/dev/hda3' it goes for 30 seconds and stops because it "can't find driver hda"

Does this make sense to anyone?

I have a feeling that this should be easy and I'm just making it complicated because I don't know enough.

I would appreciate any help,

Toshi

You should be able to reinstall grub from the rescue disc.

Your original configuration file for grub should also be still in one piece.

# /sbin/grub-install /dev/hda

# reboot

Thanks.

I went into the rescue mode and:
chroot /mnt/sysimage
/sbin/grub-install /dev/hda
Grub-install prompted that the installation was successful. I reboot the computer and it still boots to WinXP... However, just before WinXP start loading, I can see some text which looks like grub, bur only for a half second.
WinXP and RedHat are on the same hard drive and /boot/grub/grub.conf:

default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.20-8)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-8 ro root=LABEL=/ hda=ide-scsi
initrd /initrd-2.4.20-8.img
title DOS
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

I really appreciate your help,

Toshi

Ok. It's fixed now. The Linux partition apperently "moved" from hda2 to hda3, so I just had to change hd(0,1) to hd(0,2) in grub.conf.

Thanks,

Toshi