Reinstalling a boot loader from Windows?

Fenster

Well at the moment I'm testing a lot of system restore and data retrival tools, which often means I'm formatting a partition or installing an OS. The problem is that when I install any version of windows, it seems to override grub, making my Linux partitions unreachable (well, for me, I'm still new to Linux). How can I go about fixing this?

BenH

Boot from your installation CD's. As your using Suse 9.1 select the rescue option or boot from the harddisk. The rescue option has an automated repair system that will (very likely) find whats gone wrong and fix it.

You also might want to consider a commercial bootloader such as boot ng or acronis until you feel comfortable enough installing grub from scratch.

tomk

I always keep a grub boot floppy for every install I do - and most of them aren't even dual-boot! I know floppies are going (gone?) out of fashion, but they've helped me out of a hole many times.

Another basic recommendation - always install WIndows first, then Linux, although I realise this may not be possible, given what you're doing.

leeroybrown

Any boot floppy or cd that will allow you to boot linux and mount your root file system should be enough to fix it. Just boot up, mount the necessary partition(s), chroot into the install and use your own install to reinstall it's own boot loader.

Sarunas

Either have a grub or lilo boot floppy, or have use another bootloader which is able to boot from floppy. I use GAG(gag.sourceforge.net/) ever since I moved to BSDs, and Im happy with it.

You can either:

1. boot it, add your partitions and OS, then save it to MBA
2. boot it, and boot your linux partition, then restore grub to MBA(i newer used grub, with lilo it was just run #lilo and it would restore itself, provided you had a working /etc/lilo.conf)

Fenster

Thanks for the help all, I got it fixed evntually by the tried and true solution of reformatting (see my new post)