I gave up.... Linux experts, assitance please...

[mqonnet]

Hi there,

This question relates to Grub and MBR. Just to let you know before you go through the entire story.

I kind of messed up my hard drives and need any assitance that you can provide. This is what i did.

I had 1 Hard drive with win2k pro on it.
I bought another Hard drive and installed win2k again on it. Partitioned it with 15Gb and 25Gb. Both partitions are NTFS. I installed all this with the second drive as master WITHOUT conencting the 1st one. Now i installed both the hard drives. I rebooted and everything worked fine. I can see the new hard drive partitions as H and I. Now i wanted to install Redhat Linux 8.0. I rebooted my system with bootable linux CD. Installed linux on the 15Gb partition, without formatting any more. Created a bootable floppy, just in case. And then rebooted my system. Somehow, instead of me getting a Grub menu that said Dos, Linux selection. I got the "grub" prompt. I kind of panicked at this time. Because this is the first time i had my encounter with Grub. I have been into linux only for a few months now. And Have installed Linux at least 9 times. But this is the first time i faced with such a situation.

Having panicked, i searched through to find out more info on this. I learnt that we could load another Os by using the following.

rootnoverify
setup
chainloader

But was unable to boot Linux from this prompt. So, i have been doing it using the boot floppy. But since booting win2k was a painful task, i thought of messing my HD further more. I then found a third party Boot loader that i installed. Which of course changed my MBR. I then rebooted and i found this new menu from this third party installation which showed NT but failed to show linux. Which it said is supported on their web site. Now i am kind of stuck.

My question is.
How to repair Grub to show the grub menu with Dos(win2k) and linux. I tried to search through quite a lot of forums and help, but could not get any further. I have tried a looooot and have finally given up.

If someone has any thoughts please do share. Please do let me know if you want to have more info.

Thanks in advance.

Regards
KK IBM MQSeries Specialist

 

[Programmingjunkie]

You should be able to run the installer for RH again to rebuild the MBR using GRUB as your bootloader, this will make accessing the non linux partitions easier.

After you have linux running and booting properly you will need to edit the bootloader menu for GRUB something like this to allow it to boot to the other OS.

SAMPLE:
==================================
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz

# section to load linux
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.18-5.47)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.18-5.47 ro root=/dev/sda2
initrd /initrd-2.4.18-5.47.img

# section to load Windows 2000
title windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
================================
This will tell GRUB that in order to load Windoze it will have to run an additional bootloader, ie. the one for Win...
The critical pieces here are the hd references, you will have to adjust them to match your systems settings.

I have used this setup on my laptop computer and it works like a champ.

Cheers!
Dave

 

[mqonnet]

Thanks dave for your response.
I believe i ran RH installation over and again and selected bootloader be installed and it does install. But still it does not make any difference. But i shall surely try it agagin tonite.

Just a quick thought. Do i need to format the partition to ext3 instead of NTFS which is what it is, i guess. Not sure of it. Because when i boot using the Boot loader from the third party, it shows the 15gig as NTFS partitioned on which i have LInux installed.

I can boot linux just fine, using the bootable floppy. The only concern was, to repair MBR and load grub into it.

Cheers
KK

 

[Programmingjunkie]

I would suggest making the linux partition ext3, ntfs is going to cause problems. Sometimes if you do not change any of the bootloader options the MBR will not be updated.