I finally gave up.... Somone please help...

[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

[babbing]

What a novel!

a couple things to start off with.

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.

just a quicky, did you setup the pins right on the back of the harddrives? since you were working with just a single drive before, you will need to do this.

Both partitions are NTFS

i don't think that linux will install to NTFS, you must have formated that section of the drive with the ext3,2,reiserFS, or some of the other popular FS.

Just out of curiousity, why keep two copies of win2k on the same machine?

Anyways, lets walk through how to put grub on your MBR properly 8)

You will want to start by booting into linux.

open a shell and at the prompt, type 'grub'.

this will set you into the grub commandline for setup

At this point, it would be wise to know what is installed where on your harddrives. On the regular commandline, type 'cat /etc/fstab'. This will show you all of your partitions.

When i was setting up Gentoo, I kept a list of what was where next to me on a peice of paper.

Another note for grub is about syntax. When you specify a harddrive and partition, it must follow this example, including the parenthesis: (hd0,0)
This example specifies harddrive A, or the master harddrive, the first harddrive connected you your computer, however you like ot look at it, and the second 0 specifies the 1st partition on that drive. Essentially, grub starts counting at 0, not 1.

So, all you have to do after this, is type 'root (hd0,0)' where the 0's are which harddrive the /boot partition is on and which partition it is.

Then to install grub to the MBR of the master drive, type 'setup (hd0)'

To add your windows partitions, open up /etc/grub.conf with your favorite editor. Add the following to the bottom and edit the hd# and partitions as described above.

#win2k partition 1
title=Windows NT Workstation
root (hd0,5)
chainloader (hd0,5)+1

(look familiar right )

All set. That should give you enough of a headstart to not have to use a bootdisk, and lemme know if anything is unclear.


Goodluck,

Babbing

[babbing]

Any luck?

[mqonnet]

Hi Babling,

Let me start with thanking you for your patient reply. I am kind of stuck with some other stuff. I shall give a try as you suggested and get back to you.

Appreciate all your assistance.

Regards
KK

[babbing]

Goodluck ;D 8) ;D