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I am forced to use windows because of all the apps which i cant run in arch. I'm doing a games development course at uni you see and need marcomedia director and the likes. Anyways, having just got a (free) new copy of XP pro i'll be needing to reinstall, and of course i dont want to have to reinstall arch afterwards. I have a feeling tho that the mbr where grub lives may not escape unharmed. So the question is,(1) if i install windows over my old copy of windows, will grub still work? (2) if there is any doubt, how would i go about reintalling grub without having to reinstall arch from scratch?
thanks,
david
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I am forced to use windows because of all the apps which i cant run in arch. I'm doing a games development course at uni you see and need marcomedia director and the likes. Anyways, having just got a (free) new copy of XP pro i'll be needing to reinstall, and of course i dont want to have to reinstall arch afterwards. I have a feeling tho that the mbr where grub lives may not escape unharmed. So the question is,(1) if i install windows over my old copy of windows, will grub still work? (2) if there is any doubt, how would i go about reintalling grub without having to reinstall arch from scratch?
thanks,
david
1) Windows will probably destroy your grub on mbr
2) Start knoppix, go root with 'su' then type:
>grub
>root (hdm,n)
>setup (hdx)
>quit
Where m,n is ur location of your grub install. and x is ur mbr.
Good luck!!!
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thanks will have get another copy of knoppix, always lose discs.
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thanks will have get another copy of knoppix, always lose discs.
hehehe, indeed I know the feeling. But it´s the greatest tool when your stuck, like a big savior
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Perhaps you dont need a knoppix.
Boot the Arch cd and mount your partitions.
Then chroot in the new environment, and reinstall gru in the mbr
mount blah blah blah
chroot /mnt /bin/bash
grub
grub > root (hdx,y)
grub > setup (hdx)
grub > quit
exit
cd /
umount blah blah blah
reboot
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hmm..it seems there would be a little more to it than just reinstalling grub. I would imagine if you had a seperate boot partition followed by linux and windows or whatever, reinstalling windows would ovewrite the mbr and make its partion bootable leaving fudged up mbr and two bootable partitions. You may want to check that this isn't the case with knoppix using a partition tool included with it(if there is-i've never tried it).
It almost seems a little more sensible to buy another small, cheap hard drive and set it up as secondary. Then, you can install all of your windows OS's since they'll dual boot with one another fine, and leave your other drive to linux, since you usually have the freedom to decide to install grub or not...just something to consider.
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quick note: windows much be the first partition on the disk... that's just the way it works
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Agree, buy a seperate hdd for linux. It works for me
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right now windows is sitting its fat ass on my primary 40gig HD and linux is on a partition on my secondary 60gig HD along with all my back ups and music. have a slow conection and am downloading rather a lot in the run up to this big reinstall so not got knoppix yet. Though i'm now getting a little scared about messing the mbr up.
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Though i'm now getting a little scared about messing the mbr up.
Nah, don't be. As long as you have a Grub boot disk, you're safer than a baby in his crib. I've blown away the MBR several times (from Windows installs or otherwise), and it's easily restored as someone mentioned above.
Just create a Grub Boot recovery floppy first. There's docs somewhere on the net how to do that, or use Knoppix like someone said.
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Use VMWare or Qemu.
Qemu is free, and VMWare has a new beta out that is currently free for testing (and works fine).
"Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept." -- Postel's Law
"tacos" -- Cactus' Law
"t̥͍͎̪̪͗a̴̻̩͈͚ͨc̠o̩̙͈ͫͅs͙͎̙͊ ͔͇̫̜t͎̳̀a̜̞̗ͩc̗͍͚o̲̯̿s̖̣̤̙͌ ̖̜̈ț̰̫͓ạ̪͖̳c̲͎͕̰̯̃̈o͉ͅs̪ͪ ̜̻̖̜͕" -- -̖͚̫̙̓-̺̠͇ͤ̃ ̜̪̜ͯZ͔̗̭̞ͪA̝͈̙͖̩L͉̠̺͓G̙̞̦͖O̳̗͍
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If you want a Grub boot floppy, here's one way to do it:
As root,
Insert a floppy, and format it:
fdformat /dev/floppy/0
drop a filesystem on it:
mke2fs /dev/floppy/0
create the Grub boot floppy:
mount -t ext2 /dev/floppy/0 /mnt/fl/
grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/fl '(fd0)'
cp /boot/grub/menu.lst /mnt/fl
umount /mnt/fl
Then, even if you're MBR on your hard drive got 'nuked', you can always insert this floppy and you'll never even notice the difference. Then you can restore your MBR by hitting 'c' at the grub menu and doing what others outlined above.
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Yes skoal is right, as long as you reinstall grub, your good to go...sorry if I was misleading in my previous post. I still think you need to toggle off 'bootable' on your windows partition with some sort of partitioning tool though. I thought that gave me problems one time...I may be wrong.
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thanks all, managed to get it all working again
didnt even start panicing at any point which is new in a windows install.
thanks again
david
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I got a little lost in all this and I'm kind of having a similar problem with grub and XP.
This afternoon, I installed XP on second hard disk partition over a Linux install. Here is what my partitions looked like just before I started the XP installation:
disc1 Primary ext2 300MB (/boot)
disc2 Primary swap 1000MB (swap)
disc3 Primary ext3 28000MB (/root)
Then when installing XP, I created a NTFS partition:
disc1 Primary ext2 300MB (/boot)
disc2 Primary NTFS 8000MB (Win XP)
disc3 Free space (for AL, later
)
Everything went fine. XP booted.
Then I repartitioned my disk (I didn't touch the XP partition) using cfdisk on the AL boot CD. Here is what my partitions look like now, after AL is installed:
disc1 Primary ext2 300MB (something left from my old Linux installation...)
disc2 Primary NTFS 8000MB (Win XP)
disc3 Primary FAT32 (LBA) 5000MB (to share files between XP and AL)
disc5 Logical swap 1000MB
disc6 Logical ext3 20000MB (root)
During the installation of AL, I installed GRUB on disc1 with the menu.lst file edited with new lines for booting XP (as explained in the AL installation guide).:
# (1) Win XP Pro
title Win XP Pro
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
I booted AL and it's working but when I chose to boot XP, nothing happened. My screen is black with white lines showing the lines added in the menu.lst file.
What did I do wrong? Did I erased the XP part on the MBR by putting grub on disc1? Is there a solution or if I need to re-install XP, and then re-install grub on another partition (e.g., root) using the AL install CD?
Thanx for helping
P.S. Since I backed up all my valuable data somewhere else, I'm open to any easy solutions, as long as they're not as time consuming as re-installing XP and/or AL
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Since Windows is on your second partition, I believe that should be:
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
I am a gated community.
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or try the map command......
map hd0.0 hd0,1
map hd0,1 hd0,0
this way xp will always think it is in hd0,0
only add the above to the winxp section otherwise al will get lost aswell
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I tried
rootverify (hd0,1)
but it's still hanging at the bootloader...
I didn't try the
map hd0.0 hd0,1
map hd0,1 hd0,0
I guess if rootverify (hd0,1) doesn't work, the map ... command is not gonna work either?
Does anybody have another idea about what I could have done wrong?
Could it be that when I installed Grub on the first partition, it erased something it shouldn't have, and that XP needed (although it's installed on the 2nd partition)?
Thanks for your help so far.
P.S. I couldn't reply before, I got very sick the last few days...
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Hello all--
mpie wrote:
or try the map command......
map (hd0,0) (hd0,1)
map (hd0,1) (hd0,0)
I tried it but without success: I can only boot Arch Linux.
Then my questions are simple:
1) Is it because I installed GRUB on the first partition, thus maybe erasing some MBR stuff needed by XP to boot?
2) Where is the best place one should install GRUB (root?, other?)
Thanks to all. So far (about a week), I'm amazed by the help and support I get from the AL community and I can say that switching from RH9 to Arch is the best thing I have done in while!
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My main system is a single 160 GB SATA harddisk (dev/sda)
/dev/sda1 (primary) is windows XP (NTFS), some 40 GB.
/dev/sda5 is a logical swap partition on the secondary one, which also includes
/dev/sda6 (reiserFS, some 40GB) with Arch Linux,
/dev/sda7 (reiserFS, another 40 GB) running Mandriva 2005LE,
and the rest is /dev/sda8 as fat32, accessed commonly by all OS'es.
Grub from Arch is installed at /dev/sda6, LILO from Mandriva is installed at /dev/sda7, XP installed as usual and the MBR is taken by GaG (gag.sourceforge.net) which is much, much better a boot manager than it looks like. This way you can wipe ANY of your OS'es anytime without disturbing the system at all.
Microshaft delenda est
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Hi all--
Scarecrow wrote:
Grub from Arch is installed at /dev/sda6, LILO from Mandriva is installed at /dev/sda7, XP installed as usual and the MBR is taken by GaG (gag.sourceforge.net)
I tried to install Grub on the MBR but then nothing boot. I only get a message saying there is nothing to boot from hard disk along with something like ''type 'H' to retry booting from hard disk or ...''
But before that I tried other things. I reinstalled XP on the first primary partition. Then installed AL on the second (swap) and 5th (root). At the end of the AL installation process, I installed Grub on root. When I rebooted my machine, the Windows XP bootloader started and with only 2 Windows XP as choices:
1) The first XP in the menu was working;
2) The second XP didn't work. Apparently, a *.dll file was missing. I think this could come from an XP install I did last week and over which I re-installed XP or otherrwise I don't have a clue why I got two Windows XP in my bootloader menu???
Then I rebooted my computer with the AL CD and reinstalled AL but this time with Grub on /dev/discs/disc (the first on top of the list of partition where we can install Grub with the arch-0.7-base installation CD...). Since then, nothing boots.
It's been a week since I started to install AL, XP, and Grub in a way that will allow me to start with Grub to boot XP or AL at bootup (I think this is meant for this, right?) . It has worked before with Red Hat 9, when I installed it after XP. Why can't it work now with AL? What am I doing wrong?
Please help me!!! I'm very desperate and open to any suggestions
AND
I don't mind losing any data (cause I don't have any on my disk!!!)
I only want to use my Linux system ASAP and start discovering and enjoying my AL system.
Thanks so much all!
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Hello all--
mpie wrote:
or try the map command......
map (hd0,0) (hd0,1)
map (hd0,1) (hd0,0)I tried it but without success: I can only boot Arch Linux.
Then my questions are simple:
1) Is it because I installed GRUB on the first partition, thus maybe erasing some MBR stuff needed by XP to boot?
2) Where is the best place one should install GRUB (root?, other?)
Thanks to all. So far (about a week), I'm amazed by the help and support I get from the AL community and I can say that switching from RH9 to Arch is the best thing I have done in while!
mbr best place in my opinion
sorry maybe the previous post was unclear
the map commands must be used with rootnoverify
and make active e.g
title=Winsh!t
map (hd0,1) ( hda1,0)
map(hd1,0) (hd0,1)
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
boot
this works on a time machine that by default has xp on the second partition, the xp cdimage is on a first hidden partition give it a go ....
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Thanks a lot everybody!
Everything fell in place and my laptop can now dual boot WinSh!t or Arch from the Grub menu. I'm so happy now!
Here are the simple steps that got me from there to here:
1) I erased my disk completely;
2) I booted from XP CD, created a first partition (part1 -primary - NTFS) on which I installed XP;
3) I booted from ArchCD, created the second (part2 - primary - ext2 - /boot), third (part3 - primary - swap), fourth (part5 - logical - ext3 - /), and fifth (part6 - logical - FAT32 - for sharing data between OSs) partitions and set mountpoints accordingly. Part2 remained unused: as you will see below, I finally decided to install Grub on the MBR.
4) I edited /grub/menu.lst:
# (0) Arch
title Arch
root (hd0, 4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/discs/disc0/part5
# (1) XP
title Winsh!t
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
5) I installed Grub on the MBR
6) Enjoyed!
Only very minor detail: When I boot Arch and enter my login at the prompt, I'm always starting inside the /boot directory. How do I change this, for example, to start in /home or /?
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