Hi

I’m dual booting XP and RedHat 8 using GRUB, which was working very well – until today

Now all I get is the GRUB prompt, with no options to boot into either XP or RedHat.

Please, does anyone know how I can get back the options to either boot into XP or RedHat?

Thanks

did u make a boot disk?

if u did use it to boot linux and then find the grub install prog i think its called grub-install and reinstall it.

This is on a loptop with no floppy drive

so I wasnt able to make a boot disk for either OS

oh dear...

has it got a cd rom?

if it has all i can suggest is that u use linux cd to boot and do a rescue install

to boot to linux from a grub prompt you need to know the location of the kernel image, and the hdd & partition name

for example, my linux is installed on /dev/hda5 and kernel is in /boot/vmlinuz

i use these from a grub console at startup to boot to linux

root (hd0,4) #note that the partition number and hard drive numbers start at 0 instead of 1
kernel /boot/vmlinuz
boot

for xp i use the following (xp is on hda4)

rootnoverify (hd0,3)
makeactive
chainloader +1
boot

to get back the selection, you need a file in your /boot/grub directory usually, named depending on your distro...for the officla grub it is called menu.lst. Then just add these sections to that file and it will give you the menu at bootup instead of the prompt...for my settings above, this is my menu.lst:

default 0
timeout 10
title Slackware (2.6)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.3
title Slackware (2.4)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hda5 hdd=ide-scsi
title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,3)
makeactive
chainloader+1

Thanks to all and in particular to Farmchild for your help

It works, this is what I was looking