Messed up somehow. MBR problem.

neilcon · n00b Joined: 19 Sep 2004 Posts: 3

Ok well i installed everything fine. Followed every detail in the hand book and after i installed grub and rebooted i still got an old lilo boot screen from a previous version of slack i installed a while ago.

I have two HD's hda (windows) and hdb (linux). So i installed grub on hdb and wrote the mbr there also. I think my problem is that i have hda(lilo) booting instead of hdb (grub). Is this possible? can lilo be on hda even though it's an NTFS partition? I don't understand how lilo can still be there even after i formatted and installed gentoo on hdb. Lilo must reside on hda.

Im not an expert with all this so any help would be awesome.

Is there a way i can change the mbr to hdb instead of hda?

inode77 · Posted: Sun Sep 19, 2004 2:28 am Post subject:

mbjr · Posted: Sun Sep 19, 2004 9:53 am Post subject:

Also you can use a mutiboot system. Grub and Windows's boot.ini is able to handle such things (you know, the screen where you can select which os to boot when turning on your box) :-)

Please take a look at these:
Grub drive-swap: http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub-faq.html#q10
Grub multiboot (chain-loading): http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/html_node/Chain-loading.html#Chain-loading
Windows's boot.ini: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/ddtools/hh/ddtools/bootini_b6707f0b-f96b-48f1-a8ff-ce2d9675dc22.xml.asp

The way I use it:
/dev/hda1 <- ntfs partition with winxp installed, and grub sits in mbr
/dev/hdb1 <- linux boot part, no grub here :-)

_________________
mb

rush_ad · Posted: Sun Sep 19, 2004 12:00 pm Post subject:

change boot order of disks.

neilcon · n00b Joined: 19 Sep 2004 Posts: 3

Thanks inode77, i did what you told me (mounted, chrooted and installed grub on hd0 and is works now.

BUT everytime i go to boot gentoo from grub is goes back to grub boot screen all the time. I think this is because i now have grub installed on hd0 and hd1 (which i originally installed it one).

How would i get grub removed from hd1?

inode77 · Posted: Sun Sep 19, 2004 3:22 pm Post subject:

Post grub.conf and fstab please.

Normally restoring a MBR is just possible if you have a backup. To do one and the restore command (save version that does not affect the partitioning of the disk in case you change between backup and restor)