Chris is right. The bootloader of the partition itself (hd0,0) got written over by grub, not the MBR of the hard disk (hd0). Since fixmbr, but especially fixboot don't seem to do what they're supposed to (but hey, we know what company wrote this software, don't we?;-) ), the only way I see now is to get all the stuff off (which is not a problem, any other OS can see it (it's FAT, fortunately)) and delete the partition and create a new one.
The problem actually was that there's software installed on that partition that I have nowhere else and the original CD is in storage because of moving house. Of course Murphy had to get involved and I NEED that program to work with. Go figure:) Anyway, thanks for all your help:) Oh, and about the windows-not-on-the-first-partition, I seem to remember that grub can trick windows into thinking it IS on the first part, even if it's not. But I haven't played with that. Vincent oom wrote: > On Mon, 2003-08-18 at 16:50, Chris I wrote: > > On 2003.08.17 23:50, oom wrote: > > > You shouldn't need to recover the bootrecord, in fact you should be > > > able > > > to set grub up to boot your XP partition, not sure how you have your > > > partiation table layed out (give us an fdisk -l /dev/hda). > > > > Unfortunately, the problem that Vincent is having (and I have had in > > the past) is that he accidently wrote grub to (hd0,0) instead of (hd0). > > > > To the best of my knowledge, the windows bootloader is on hd0,0 (the > > windows mbr simply boots the first primary partition with the boot flag > > set, usually hd0,0) > > Couldn't he change the active partition with fdisk ? > > > Whether he was to reinstall grup properly or not, this leaves an > > unbootable windows partition. Usually windows isnt kept around purely > > for bragging rights, so he probably wants to fix it ;) > > Hmm, i'm not an NT/XP expert, but I had a similar situation with a '98 > box where lilo blasted away the windows partition, fdisk /mbr fixed it > no problem. > > Shouldn't he be able to start with a bootdisk configure grub with (hd0) > and add XP to the list of O/S's to boot ? > > Or do you also need the boot code sitting on /dev/hda2 to load windoze ? > > > > (AFAIK you can't install XP on any partition higher than 0 anyway) > > > > you can with any of the NT-based windows versions, iirc, and at the > > very least with xp. > > Hrm, well I don't know why after installing linux on a friends laptop > and then trying to install XP to /dev/hda3 an error popped up saying > something to the effect of "Windows must be installed on first partition > of disk" fortunatly it was just a debian/knopix install and he just > wanted linux for curiousity's sake ;-) me being enthuiastic and thinking > microsoft wouldn't complain about not having their O/S first on the > disk, just slapped linux /dev/hda1 swap /dev/hda2 xp /dev/hda3 grr. > > after > xp /dev/hda1 > linux /dev/hda2 > swap /dev/hda3 > > all worked fine.. > > Or did I miss something to do in XP ? > -- > ooM > > > -- > [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list > -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
