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Cant boot laptop after installing Linux on seperate HD

C

Chris2wire

Senior member
Ok so I ran Centos install CD and reformatted and installed it onto a USB hard drive without touching the internal hard drive.

Install finished and now I cannot boot into the original internal XP hard drive. Before XP splash screen is just sits with the word "GRUB" in the upper left hand corner.

During this time the Linux external HD is not plugged in and the install CD is out... But it wont boot back into the internal XP hard drive system...
 
Originally posted by: Chris2wire
Ok so I ran Centos install CD and reformatted and installed it onto a USB hard drive without touching the internal hard drive.

Install finished and now I cannot boot into the original internal XP hard drive. Before XP splash screen is just sits with the word "GRUB" in the upper left hand corner.

During this time the Linux external HD is not plugged in and the install CD is out... But it wont boot back into the internal XP hard drive system...
Click to expand...

It looks like you installed the GRUB Bootloader into the MBR of the internal hard drive.

Boot from the windows CD and from the recovery console enter the fixmbr ( The fixmbr command is a recovery console command that creates a new boot record. ). This should allow you to boot back into Windows on the internal drive. The only two options for booting from the USB drive that I have been successful with are boot from the install CD or use System Commander ( which works only if your BIOS supports booting from USB ).

pcgeek11
 
Well I was able to boot from USB Linux when I put the Linux LiveCD onto the USB drive...

But when I tried to actually install Linux onto a USB drive, thats when hell broke loose.

But yes, I dont have my xp cd or anything...
 
Well when it talks about the 'MBR' it usually means the first 512k of the first harddrive.

I don't know how the CentOS installer goes or anything like that, but usually it asks about weither or not you want to install the bootloader to MBR. Should of said 'no' I suppose and specified the /dev/ file for your USB stuff. (or since it's usb the disk-id-label). Grub is pretty squirelly sometimes with usb drives if you plan on booting it up on multiple machines as the drive assignments can change as you move from machine to machine. Probably use lilo for that, but I am not sure the best way to do it. But if it's on a regular machine with no changes to drive assignments then it should work fine.


As far as restoring your windows bootloader goes you'll have to find a way to reinstall the Windows loader to MBR. This is generally done with XP's recovery console and you generally get to that by using your Windows cdrom. But since you don't have a cdrom.... That gets difficult.

If your using a OEM machine and they just didn't give you a cdrom you can probably get one cheaply from them since your licensed for it, I am guessing.

Bartpe disk can restore MBR.. but I think you need to save your MBR first in order to do that, so that may not be to helpfull. Not sure though you may want to look into that.

If yoru system can boot into Linux with the USB drive plugged in then you can easily configure grub to boot up Windows XP.

Once booted into XP I bet there is a command to install the bootloader back into the MBR... but I don't know how that goes. Maybe somebody else will know.
 
Well see im on my other computer right now. And I have the damaged MBR hard drive plugged into the USB slot on this working computer. So if theres anything that needs to be done hopefully I can just fix it like this?

btw, youre right about the Centos install having an option for where to put the bootloader. I just ignored it. Stupid me.
 
With windows I don't think so. The drive order matters and stuff like that. (With Linux it would be difficult that way)

boot loaders only have about 200Kb or so of disk space they need to fit into.. so they are all pretty stupid so the hardware needs to be all in predictable places.

I think that any XP disk that you can get into recovery console should work. I don't think it needs to be the exact version of XP that you have installed on the drive. Maybe you can borrow a 'real' XP cdrom from somebody else or a different computer and use that to get into the recovery console and run the fixmbr stuff?
 
could he use fdisk /mbr from dos?
That's what I did many years ago when a linux install made things bad. But those old dos floppies won't recognize NTFS, but I bet there have been new ones made by somebody. And if he had FAT32 would fdisk /mbr "just work"?
 
No.

That will destroy the MBR. You used that with Win9x because the bootloader installation for win9x systems was too stupid to clean out the MBR properly and bits and peices of lilo (linux loader) would get left and executed by the BIOS making the system unbootable. The /mbr would wipe it out a bit better.

You only would want to do that if your wiping out your system and want to reinstall. And it worked like crap back then also. It would miss parts of the loader and parts of the partition tables that sort of thing.



The recovery console command fixmbr reads the configuration information for the NTLDR bootloader from the Windows system installed on the harddrive and attempts to restore the bootloader back into a workable state. That way you can boot back into your system like nothing happenned.

If he wanted to reinstall then it wouldn't be a big deal, just reinstall it. I think that the NTLDR installer stuff is smart enough that the /mbr stuff is not needed anymore.
 
could he use fdisk /mbr from dos?
That's what I did many years ago when a linux install made things bad. But those old dos floppies won't recognize NTFS, but I bet there have been new ones made by somebody. And if he had FAT32 would fdisk /mbr "just work"?
Click to expand...

Yes this does work with boot floppies, I have used a Win98 floppy lots of times... The NTFS doesn't mean squat in the MBR.

Put drive back into the original PC.
Boot from Win98 floppy
fdisk /mbr

That should do it.

pcgeek11
 
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