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Bootloader troubles, again...


ffi
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Today, I decided to restore a ghost image of my windows installation (one made beofre I ever installed linux). But now GRUB fails in stage 1.5 with error code 15.

 

I have 2 harddisks, one sata and one ide, the sata one is the only possible bootdevice. My windows partition is on the sata drive (which has 2 partitions) and my linux on my ide (which has 3 partitions, mandriva is on hda3, ubuntu on hda2).

 

I tried reinstalling the bootloader using the rescue mode on the mandriva 2006 cd-rom but I still get the same error message....

 

[moved from Software by spinynorman]

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Seems as if your fstab does not match the grub entries anymore. The basic problem here is that identification of the root on the kernel line has to match the identification of the root in the fstab. You should to have e.g. a "root (hd0,1)" command for specifying the partitions before any other information is being read. If you can't figure out how you should change your grub, please post your /boot/grub/menu.lst file and you /etc/fstab, so we can take a look at it.

 

In a worst case scenario, you messed up the partition structure, thus trashing your system completely.

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Okay when I selected the bootdevice from the boot menu I was able to bot up mandriva and reinstalling from mcc got me back grub (from a different bootdevice (hda) now).

 

Still windows (XP pro) is not booting. It resides on sda5 on a ntfs partition but I get an error unrecognized filetype*...

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It was just one of the errors I got, I tried many entries but none worked.....

 

I tried something like

title windows

root (hd1,4)

map (0x81) (0x80)

map (0x80) (0x81)

makeactive

chainloader +1

and

title windows

root (hd1,4)

makeactive

chainloader +1

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Normally for windows it should be rootnoverify instead of root. The root wording attempts to mount the partition, which isn't really necessary with the Windows partition.

 

Whenever I've searched for setting up booting Windows in grub it always lists rootnoverify in the howto. Although some configs do put root. Sample config would be:

 

title windows
rootnoverify (hd1,4)
makeactive
chainloader +1

 

using yours as above for the example. Are you sure that the hd1,4 bit is correct? hd0 refers to the first hard disk drive as seen by the system, and hd1 would be the second device. On my system with two IDE drives, one master and one slave, the first /dev/hda is hd0 and /dev/hdb is hd1.

 

On a server I built, the sata drives were found first, and therefore they were hd0 and the ide's came after this.

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Okay, when restoring the ghost image of my windows installation I didn't set it to bootable because I thought, I would boot with GRUB, after fixing this, the above entry would boot Windows.

 

I still have some little issues with GRUB and the MCC though. I also have an installation of Ubuntu but whenever I use the MCC, these entries are removed from /boot/grub/menu.lst , it only keeps the mandriva entries :s

Edited by ffi
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Don't use the wizard, we'll do it the manual way, and it's real quick. First you need to create the grub.conf. I'll use my machine as an example, it has Linux installed in /dev/hda2, which for grub is hd0,1. /dev/hda1 would be hd0,0 and /dev/hdb1 would be hd1,0 - you get the picture :P

 

So now:

 

grub
root (hd0,1)
setup (hd0)

 

the first command opens grub, then the second commands tells you where to find the bootable Linux partition that has your grub config file, and then the third command writes the bootloader to the MBR of this drive. Replace hd0,1 with wherever your partition resides.

 

If you need more help, post your partition, and we can also help with the grub config. I would look in the /boot/grub/menu.lst or /boot/grub/grub.conf on both Mandriva and Ubuntu partitions, and this will give the info for booting each version. Then copy and paste into the other grub config, and use this one for writing the boot loader.

 

And make sure you use the manual method above for future editing, else you'll just lose the ability to boot one distro over another until you do it manually again.

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