I had two linux installations on my thinkpad R60 laptop drive: kubuntu and archlinux. Archlinux was put atop an old win7 beta installation.
So everything worked fine, as I used grub2 from my kubuntu installation.
But two days ago I decided to install win7 atop my kubuntu installation, as I wasn't using it anymore and I needed windows for starcraft 2 for the best experience.
Windows put its own boot manager into MBR, as expected.
Today I decided to reinstall grub1 from my arch installation and failed. Why? GRUB refused the setup. I've already managed how to chroot into arch from the archlinux installation cd and I still got errors like /boot/grub/stage1 or Error 17 in the /tmp/grub-install.log.xxxx log files...
So I checked fdisk -l and there was nothing suspicious.
But I had a feeling that the problem lies inside the partition table...
So I played around with fdisk...
Here is "fdisk -l" I saw at first:
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2046 206847 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS <- some ibm rescue media
/dev/sda2 206848 82118655 40955904 7 HPFS/NTFS <- archlinux
/dev/sda3 82131840 234435599 76151880 5 Extended <- thanks to gparted
/dev/sda5 82131903 86017679 1942888+ 82 Linux Swap / Solaris <- swap for kubuntu/archlinux, now only for arch
/dev/sda6 86018048 234434559 74208256 7 HPFS/NTFS <- win7 with starcraft 2 ;)
So the weirdest thing was, that my archlinux was on /dev/sda2!
I saw, that it was somehow marked as an ntfs partition (it was win7 beta initially) so I changed it with "fdisk t" to Linux (83) and I could install grub.
Now everything is working fine.
Maybe we can add this hint to the GRUB's wikipage?
So people won't waste to much time fixing it, as it's a very easy fix...
Cheers, kulpae
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