On Tue, Dec 27, 2005 at 10:26:49AM -0800, Alan Crandall wrote:
> I screwed up my Windows install and need help get them back.
> Does fdisk /mbr just over write the mbr so I can boot into
> Windows and Linux or just Windows or neither ? Thanks
It overwrites the MBR with one that will attempt to boot the first active
primary partition. I use GNU MBR because it will do that by default, but
also has some extra knobs.
The exact nature of my partition scheme depends on the drives and whether
the system will actually be dual-booting or just needs a small freedos
partition for BIOS flashing. I've set aelita up like so:
sda1: Type 0C (FAT32 LBA), 30 GB
sda2: Type 83 (Linux), 30 GB
sda3: Type 05 (Extended), 240 GB
sda5: Type 83 (Linux), 238 GB
sda6: Type 82 (Linux swap), 2 GB
Since aelita must boot Windows once in awhile, the big FAT32 partition is
a necessity. Even if I just used it for BIOS flashing and diagnostics,
I'd probably have made it about 1 GB just because you never know when
you'll need to toss a CD image in on a filesystem any OS can read. The
result of installing Windows is that sda1 is populated and the MBR
installed is Microsoft's.
Then I installed Linux. I've put / on sda2 and /home on sda5. You don't
see more partitions here because I don't use them--modern systems don't
need a /boot even. The seperate /home is so that I can trivially blow
away the Linux distribution and maintain my data.
GRUB goes onto sda2, and I set the boot flag on sda2 instead of sda1 using
cfdisk. Now when I reboot, I get a GRUB menu, but at any time I could
make Windows the active partition and totally hide GRUB and Linux. I
don't like doing this though because the GUI volume manager in Windows XP
doesn't let you set an unknown partition type as active. You have to do
it from a command prompt, which is annoying because I do it so rarely that
I can never remember exactly how without looking it up. (That's why I
install Windows first--so I don't have to look it up!)
Anyway, at this point I can use the Microsoft MBR or I can install GNU MBR
(which I do, because it's very handy sometimes!)
--
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act,
but a habit."
-- Aristotle
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