help GRUB is lost! I need to boot Linux from HardDisk
 

:Pengy: hi everyone!
I have a little strange problem with me which is as follows:
1. I had a system installed with Windows2000,
2. Then I installed Linux (Red Hat 9.0) on my machine.
3. Everything went right and I was having a boot menu with 2 options of Windows & Linux on it.
4. After some time, as per the ususal behaviour of Windows, it got corrupted and I reinstalled it.
5. Now after the installation I am not able to boot in to the Linux and I can't afford to reinstall it and loose my important data.
Please help me to reconfigure GRUB and restore my boot menu with both options having Linux & Windows.
Please help me. Thanks in advance.

grub has given me nothing but trouble, and the worst part is that it really doesnt tell you what is wrong unless you can get it to actually boot... so what i did was just switch to the lilo bootloader. it is a bit simpler to work with. i just had this same trouble. the only way that i could boot linux was from the disk, and it wouldnt let me boot windows at all, and it woulnt mount my harddrives.
lilo should solv the problem, or at least give you error messages that will tell you what is wrong.

there is also some extensive data on the grub bootloader and fixes and all that here :http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...5&goto=newpost

just hit search and type in grub, and you'll get a bunch of good stuff..

Make a boot disk for linux.. or use the one you SHOULD have made when you installed.

Boot from boot disk. <-- that should have been obvious.

Then:

# grub-install /dev/hda

Assuming hda is the right drive.

Cake.

-b

Thanks for the invaluable suggestions.
After issuing the command, do I need to configure GRUB some how or will it work fine enough to DUAL boot my system?
Regards,
Varun Narang.

It depends, when you reinstalled windows did you reformat the whole harddrive or just the partition windows was on? If you reformatted the whole drive then your Redhat install is gone and you will have to reinstall Redhat. If you only formatted the windows partition then your Redhat install is fine and your original grub.conf file is fine also, no configuration is necessary.

I have a couple of questions about all this as it happened to me too:
I have MDK 10.1 and I installed M$ winXP (out of need) and I lost my lilo. I booted Knoppix Live CD 3.3 and I tried to make lilo install on the mbr of my /dev/hda and to make it use the files that reside in my /boot partition - boot.img, vmlinuz and so on - and I did not make it.
Q1: How can I make lilo install for another OS than the one that is currently up?

I managed to install Grub for that partition but with the command line.
I managed to make him take my kernel into account and start using it to boot but it gave me a kernel panic. Smth about the root fs.
Q2: is there any way I could have booted using grub?

well.. it would seem to me that you could install lilo with knoppix, and make it so that it will also boot that other stuff, and then just put knoppix on the bottom, it would then be as if you had 2 different versions of linux available to boot as well as windows. i dont belive that you would even need to have knoppix all the time because it would load lilo from the /boot

Thnaks for the response zajelo3.

hi engima82!
I got ur problem. Nut I think, if you are using Knoppix Live CD then there is no need to include it as an item in the boot menu and it can boot by itself from the CD ROM Drive.
Rest is about Mandrake Linux, so about that you can boot it from your Bootable Linux CDs or the Floopy that you should have created at the installation time and that too in the rescue mode. This can also be done with the Red Hat Linux. After that you can fix the problem as described above.
I think this can satisfy you.
Have A Nice Time.

hi

Boot with u r linux first installation cd n then

at boot:

type

"linux rescue"

and at the coming prompt type

"chroot /mnt/sysimage"

now install grub by

"grub-install /dev/hda"

"reboot"

this solves the problem but u r pc now boots in to linux alwys

with no options at the boot up....

For this to take care

"fdisk -l"

at the command prompt

and add the following to u r /etc/grub.conf

title windows
rootnoverify hd(x,y)
chainloader +1
boot

x,y r chosen frm the output frm fdisk -l

take care u have to decrease by 1 the no

Then i think :)) u must have restored u r previous grub....

hi there,

for the previous solution i gave

in the windowz restoration part



rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
boot

use this instead of that