Newb Linux question

[eigen]

My friend erased his windows partion on a dualboot windows/rh9 laptop.Now when he boots the he is brought up to a grub command line.What does he need to do in order boot and or to repair his boot record.

 

[Blaizer2]

Not sure if you can repair the erased partition....Try using the Linux install CD/floppy.

 

[eigen]

Thnx He is going to try that.
ANy other thoughts.

 

[UmneyDurak]

Try booting with rescue CD, and editing the grub.config file. When he deleted windows partitions, the linux partitions changed "names". So for example instead of /dev/hda4, etc they become /dev/hda1, etc.

 

[Nothinman]

Try booting with rescue CD, and editing the grub.config file. When he deleted windows partitions, the linux partitions changed "names"

Not necessarily, it depends on how he delete the partition. Some tools will rearrange the existing partitions and change their numbers and some won't.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

Originally posted by: eigen
My friend erased his windows partion on a dualboot windows/rh9 laptop.Now when he boots the he is brought up to a grub command line.What does he need to do in order boot and or to repair his boot record.

Very difficult without more info, but I'll bite.

What program was used to delete his Windows partition?

Was the partition actually deleted, or has Grub simply taken over as the bootloader?

Does he have an option under Grub to boot DOS?

If he can boot into RH, can he mount /dev/hda1, and if so are all of his files still there? If the partition and files are still intact, use RH's boot configuration utility or manually edit Grub to add the Windows boot option.

Of course, if he actually did delete the partition, and used that part of the disk for RH, then it is gone.

 

[oog]

Is it possible that he didn't delete the partition, but just wrote a new boot loader to the disk? He may just need to add the appropriate grub entry to also boot to windows.

 

[eigen]

Originally posted by: AnonymouseUser

Originally posted by: eigen
My friend erased his windows partion on a dualboot windows/rh9 laptop.Now when he boots the he is brought up to a grub command line.What does he need to do in order boot and or to repair his boot record.

Very difficult without more info, but I'll bite.

What program was used to delete his Windows partition?

Was the partition actually deleted, or has Grub simply taken over as the bootloader?

Does he have an option under Grub to boot DOS?

If he can boot into RH, can he mount /dev/hda1, and if so are all of his files still there? If the partition and files are still intact, use RH's boot configuration utility or manually edit Grub to add the Windows boot option.

Of course, if he actually did delete the partition, and used that part of the disk for RH, then it is gone.

He deleted he Windows partion from windows Using partition magic 8.

We went to edit grub.conf (this is after booting from Knoppix live) but the file could not be located..

None of this matters as I convinced him to move from rh9 to FC2.So he is just going to do a fresh install.