I recently had a disk crash on my multidisk dual boot system. Things were nice and neat, with WinXP on one drive, RH9.0 on the other. Ran Grub to multiboot. RH9.0 had a severe disk failure, so I went out and got myself a new disk. I took out the Windows disk, installed Fedora6 on the new disk, transfered some files and things looked peachy. I installed Grub from the new disk, effectively erasing the old Grub from RH9.0. Things looked great and booted fine to the new disk Fedora.

So, I modified the menu.lst file to accomodate the incoming windows disk. I shut down, yanked out the RH9.0 disk and installed the WinXP disk. Booted up, got the nice visual Grub window. Selected the Windows option and the machine crashed. I rebooted, and I get:

So, I yank out the Windows disk. Get the same error. I also removed the original Windows bootloading statement in rescue mode, but that did not change anything. The grub.info doc reveals this error means "Cannot mount selected partition", which is insightful but not helpful.

I get my Fedora6 disk and go into rescue mode. I make myself a boot disk following the procedures grub.info file. I then execute the following in rescue mode:

The find statement can not find anything in my file structure at all. I do the same things using the grub boot disk and get the same results.

fdisk -l produces the following (subbing # for long numbers)

I've done some searching on this forum and various others. The attempted solutions so far have not worked on this machine. It just seems Grub can not recognize the file structure, but when I use the rescue disk, I can go locate the neccessary files, for instance, I can see my previous file structure.

Any clues or ideas how to proceed from here? I've been at this for about 3 days, and I've run out of ideas! Help!

BTW, other things I've tried.

Grub unhide for the drive
cursing at the computer
putting WinXP disk back
putting RH9.0 disk back
moving Fedora drive to different slot
reinstall Grub using grub-install (since it won't work via other procedure listed in grub.info)

So far, no joy

I think the easiest option would be to reinstall Fedora, and this time leave the Windows drive where it is.

Fedora will be able to detect Windows, and set up Grub appropriately.

--Ian

I faced problems similar to yours but my XP and FC6 were on the same disk. How I solved my problem is at this link. Perhaps this will help you to sort out your.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=522389

R N Ghosh

I think I'm going to try that... just one thing to check. I've recently transfered a bunch of files from a different computer that has just been wiped. Will this leave my home directory intact? I don't have any other disks to put these files on at the moment... I think that might be the easiest approach, just I don't want to lose those files!

From what I'm seeing, the install would wipe the disk. Is there a way to just reinstall one package? That being Grub? Getting a refresh of those files might solve the problem...

You can try grub-install, but since you have already tried that ...

Did you put /home on a separate partition? If you did, then your files will be OK. If you didn't then you will need to back them up. Also, make sure you create a separate /home when you reinstall.

--Ian

well, I went out and installed Grub2. After a bit of playing with it, I got Linux to load properly. The only problem I'm not having is that WindowsXP won't load correctly, according to the brief tutorial I've read at
http://grub.enbug.org/TestingOnX86

anyone have any ideas? I'm getting the following error: