continuing conversion problems .... setting the active partition ... 1

[theEclipse]

Hello.

I am in the process of converting my desktop computer to a full dual boot computer. Why? Because I will be running linux while others (my roomates) will be running windows.

I have windows installed on hda, as well as a data partition (ntfs, temporary). I have a permanant data drive (to be formatted as FAT of some sort so that both O/S can access it). The permanant data drive is currently unpartitioned space, freshly formatted. I am having trouble formatting it with FAT because windows likes itself too much -- but that is going to be up in the windows forum.

As it stands now, I have just deleted an older linux partition (FC3) and that was converted to my current NTFS data partition (so that I could convert my real data partition to FAT). If that doesnt make sense to you dont worry about it.

My problem is this: somewhere I have Grub loaded and my computer boots to it. However grub doesnt know what it is doing so it just shows me a uber-basic shell (ls command is not even supported). I have tried putting in a live CD Ubuntu and locating my hard drive so that I could set the correct partition to active with fdisk, but it cant find any hard drives, even though they are listed in /dev. I tried mounting hda with no luck.

Is there another way to set the active partition to windows so that I can finish what I started? I can download another live cd if I must, but I dont really know what the benefit would be, unless it has alot of disk utilities.

Robert Carpenter
"Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose." - C.S. Lewis (Preface to Paradise Lost)
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http://www.robertcarpenter.net

 

[Chacalinc]

to boot windows manually you need to know where windows is and then follow the steps explained in:

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/html_node/Chain_002dloading.html#Chain_002dloading

Anyway, using a liveCD you should be able to maunt the windows partitions with the mount commands and using the partition, example:

mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows

-or- you can see the disk partitions with:

fdisk -l /dev/hda

Cheers.

Chacal, Inc.

 

[Chacalinc]

BTW, thee complete GRUB manual:

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/html_node/index.html

Chacal, Inc.

 

[Chacalinc]

I have tried putting in a live CD Ubuntu and locating my hard drive so that I could set the correct partition to active with fdisk, but it cant find any hard drives, even though they are listed in /dev. I tried mounting hda with no luck.

oops, sorry!! misunderstood the question. Well, in order to modify the grub config you need to have linux installed in your hard drive, so you can modify the grub.conf and issue a "grub-install /dev/hda". But the problem is that you don't have linux installed, so you can install linux now OR fix the MBR with windows (at least as a termporal fix) booting with a floppy (DOS) and issue "fdisk /mbr" (

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q69/0/13.ASP

)

Cheers.

Chacal, Inc.