Re: Help with grub setup for dual-boot system

From: Chaz Ginger (cginboston_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 11/12/05 

Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 16:46:33 GMT

I think I have an inkling as to what is going on.

The fact that you did an fdisk /mbr, and assuming it worked, it will
look for the first "bootable" partition and use it.

The reason sys c: fails with with an invalid media because the first
partition that is a FAT partition doesn't have the necessary files. In
this case it is looking for the MSDOS boot files (remember they have the
name IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS I believe).

My guess is that your partition table doesn't have what it needs to run
Windows and Linux. You can't have any FAT16 or FAT32 partitions that
aren't Windows as the first one and bootable. Windows can't boot from
what it thinks is drive D. So if you have DOS as the first partition,
you lose. Make certain that Windows is installed in the very first FAT,
FAT16, FAT32 or NTFS partition.

Second, the MBR is fine, assuming you didn't get an error from FDISK (I
assume it was able to write on sector 0). What the MBR does is look for
the first partition with the BOOTable flag set. Given that Grub started
up it sounds like it is your Linux partition. That is fine too.

I don't remember seeing your grub.conf, so that check to see if it is
alright. But before any of us waste any more time on this effort I
suggest you show us your partition table as FDISK (msdos's version or
Linux' FDISK). That will answer about a 1000 questions.

Chance

Roby wrote:
> anoneds@netscape.net wrote:
>
>
>>Did fdisk /mbr.
>>Tried sys c:, says invalid media on drive c.
>>When I rebooted, got "grub" in upper left corner, had to boot "linux
>>rescue" on my fc2 disk, chroot /mnt/sysimage, grub-install /dev/hda to
>>get Linux back.
>>
>>Still no Windows. Sucks that the data is there just can't boot to it.
>>
>>Any suggestions?
>>
>>I rechecked the BIOS settings, disk was set to AUTO, tried USER with
>>LBA, still same thing. At AUTO, LBA was there, just greyed out. Haven't
>>run a disk using CHS setup for a LONG time.
>>
>>Still no answer to one question I had.
>>
>>Upon booting off Windows CD, running FDISK, it asks if I want to enable
>>Large Disk support. I think I did this when I had to recover from a
>>hard drive failure a couple years back. Could this be what is causing
>>me to not be able to access it? Or will doing this ensure I cannot get
>>my data back?
>>
>>Ben
>
> This machine has "ms-dos 7.1" on hda, /boot/grub is on hda9, mbr pointing to
> grub. I booted a dos floppy and did fdisk/mbr, then rebooted. Instead of
> the usual grub menu, I got a dos-prompt. To restore the grub menu, I
> booted a grub floppy and entered root (hd0,8) followed by setup (hd0) and
> rebooted again.
>
> Maybe you need to reboot between the fdisk/mbr and sys c: on your setup.
> I've pitched my win cd's so I can't try it your way.
>
> The "enable Large Disk support" might be an offer to turn on FAT32 for the
> install rather then turning on LBA in the BIOS ... I'm guessing.
>
> You're more likely to find windows answers in a newsgroup specializing in
> that stuff.

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