replace wiped mbr
 

I was running dual boot win xp and suse 10.1. While in xp it for some unknown reason wiped the mbr. Now on boot I have option to invoke 4 drives. Drive 0 puts me into xp the others go to screens where keyboard is not active.

I have a new giant hard drive on order and will not do anything until I ghost my old drives to it.

After that I want to try to repair the current set up. I think I can use my xp install disk to get the standard win xp boot back and assuming its successful I want to know how to get suse back. I do have a recent knoppix run disk if that would be helpful.

Thanks
Stan

Hi Stan,
If I understand correctly, you choose among 4 drives at boot and "Drive 0" will successfully boot Windows XP. Rather than the MBR, this sounds like a problem with the GRUB boot loader configuration.

1. First, take a moment to learn how to configure GRUB (see, for example, this page). You might want to print out a sample grub.conf file. This will be helpful in the next steps.

2. Reboot, and then when asked which drive to boot, highlight your SUSE Linux option and press "e". This will let you view and edit the GRUB boot configuration for that option (the interface for editing is rather unusual, but it will display some help text on screen). Any changes you make will only apply to the current boot; changes are not saved. Edit the configuration, and when you are done, press "b" to try to boot.

3. If you boot successfully:
Remember the configuration that you used to boot - you now need to make your boot configuration change permanent. If you don't know, figure out which partition is your boot partition, where GRUB is located. Then fix your (boot partition)/grub/grub.conf (you may need to mount the boot partition first). Reboot and verify that your new configuration is working.

If you don't boot successfully:
Reboot and try again. If you still can't figure it out, here is what can do. First, boot with that handy Knoppix CD. Figure out which partition is your boot partition, where GRUB is located (you may need to mount it first). Open your GRUB configuration file, (boot partition)/grub/grub.conf, and write it out on a piece of paper. Then, come back to this forum and please post your grub.conf.

Good luck :)

replace wiped mbr
 

I am studying grub and thanks for the link. However, as far as I can tell grub is gone. I go through standard post then at once to the screen giving me the 0,1,2,3 option and the 0 option goes directly to xp with no option for Suse. I have found a procedure that will in the future give me the option of setting up a boot cd and numerous options for os'es which reportedly will not conflict. But that is a future possibility and will not help till I get the current mess fixed.

[QUOTE=mellowmellow]Hi Stan,
If I understand correctly, you choose among 4 drives at boot and "Drive 0" will successfully boot Windows XP. Rather than the MBR, this sounds like a problem with the GRUB boot loader configuration.

1. First, take a moment to learn how to configure GRUB (see, for example, this page). You might want to print out a sample grub.conf file. This will be helpful in the next steps.

2. Reboot, and then when asked which drive to boot, highlight your SUSE Linux option and press "e". This will let you view and edit the GRUB boot configuration for that option (the interface for editing is rather unusual, but it will display some help text on screen). Any changes you make will only apply to the current boot; changes are not saved. Edit the configuration, and when you are done, press "b" to try to boot.
SNIP*************************

the rescue mode of most linux distro should have an option
to reinstall grub (if this is what you want to do / need to do)
Type rescue at the boot of you distro cd

replace wiped mbr
 

When trying to install western digital hard drive utilities I got a message stating I had a boot manager "system commander" running and to close it. After much further poking about I see its looking for a file. To the best of my knowledge I did not install the program and I can not find it. It seems to be residing in the boot sector of 0 drive.

How do I access this area so I can delete it?

Stan

look for the learn dd command thread in LQ

saying that if you just reinstall grub this should clean the MBR

Myabe it just does not know of grub and call it sys commanded

wipped mbr
 

Thanks for info. Lots of reading to do. Will experiment with this over the weekend. Fed EX delivers my new hard drive tomorrow and I will back up all my current system prior to doing anything risky.
Stan