Grub error 22 (Dual Boot)

dmulla

Hi everybody,
So i made a wee bit of an error lastnight.....i'm a bit of a n00b.
For the last while i've had both xp and Suse 9.3 installed on my machine, with the hard disk split into 2 partitions, 90g for windows and 20g for linux. Recently i've run out of space on my windows partition. I read somewhere that you can non-destructively resize and enlarge your partitions with a thing called GParted, and since i rarely ever use linux i decided i'd get rid of it. So i downloaded this thing and burned it to a cd and booted with it. I saw with this utility that there were 4 partitions:
1) windows ~ 90gig
2) linux ~ 20gig
3) linux swap page space or something ~ 1gig
4) unknown (unpartitioned? cant remember) ~ 8megs

So i went ahead and deleted the 3 partitions and resized the windows one to the max and rebooted.
Then i get a Grub error similar to this one.
My sort of understanding now is that when i installed linux i over wrote the boot sector(??) or the mbr? And now when i boot the machine the boot sector or something is loading grub, which cant find the linux partition? So my guess is that i need to get rid of grub altogether and reinstall the windows loader (ntldr?). But i don't understand where grub is coming from at all? Like where is it installed? Is it on the windows partition? Where's the boot sector?
Anyway, If i boot of the xp cd and go into recovery mode and issue the fixmbr command to give me a new mbr it gives me all sorts of warnings about the particians and warning that the partitions may not be recognisable after running fixmbr!!!! I CANT lose the data on this disk. Somebody help me PLEASE!
Any ideas?
Thanks

Karoma

(Sorry, it's unclear whether you tried or are asking before trying..)

Go with fixmbr [and fixboot if needs be].

Alternatively, fdisk /mbr instead of fixmbr (Shouldn't need to...)


And going much further down this road for completeness sake... other options further on to preserve your data:
- Try to boot up using a LiveCD (Knoppix,et al) and back up your data....
- XP Repair

dmulla

Karoma wrote:

(Sorry, it's unclear whether you tried or are asking before trying..)

Go with fixmbr [and fixboot if needs be].

Alternatively, fdisk /mbr instead of fixmbr (Shouldn't need to...)


And going much further down this road for completeness sake... other options further on to preserve your data:
- Try to boot up using a LiveCD (Knoppix,et al) and back up your data....
- XP Repair

Wow! Quick reply, thanks! I haven't ran fixmbr yet because i'm scared it will mess up the partitions, because when i tried it i got lots of warnings about the partitions and warning that the partitions may not be recognisable after running fixmbr! I cant remember exactly what the warning was, but i'll check as soon as i get home and post it up, but what ever it was it got me worried...
I actually have a knoppix cd, so backing up first might be an option to my second HD, but thats full aswell, so i'd have to burn 120gigs worth of dvd's first! And Can i burn a dvd in knoppix (having 2 optical drives obviously!)? And will knoppix recognize both disks and their partitions? Sorry, i'm not very experienced...
Or instead of going to all that trouble, do you think that running fixmbr will cause me to lose the data on my hd? What exactly does it do? I think it re-writes ntldr and the mbr, but where do they get written to? The windows partition?

Karoma

To be honest, fixmbr works a lot of the time. I haven't used Knoppix in a while,and never with a DVD recorder, I used k3b though...I'd imagine there's suitable recording software bundled - check distrowatch, or google. I've personally never seen or heard of it making things worse. The Master Boot Record (MBR) doesn't reside in either partition - it's typically in the 1st sector of the HDD. I've never actually explained it so I could be wrong... but... it looks up the partition table, and it's determined from there which partition to boot, then control is handed over to the boot sector of the selected partition... (Which leads to NTLDR ...)