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Thread ID: 41947	2004-01-27 07:44:00	Booting XP from Grub	agent (30)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
210367	2004-01-28 08:39:00	If you look through the thread "Messed up Grub - won't boot Windows" started by me on 20 Jan, you may find some further hints from these guys. They sorted it out for me after I had stuffed it up. You will be able to see what I had in grub.conf, and what Chill in particular suggested I change. That worked fine for me. Chill's comment to make a back up of grub.conf before editing it was sage advice, by the way, though too late because I had already stuffed it up without a back up... John H	John H (8)
210368	2004-01-28 10:53:00	> though too > late because I had already stuffed it up without a > back up... :D So lets get a few things straight here, please post the following: Master/Slave/Primary/Secondary positionings of HDD's and the partitions What you have on which partitions (eg, Windows on /dev/hdb1, / on /dev/hda2, /boot on /dev/hda1 etc) That way we can work out EXACTLY what your .conf file needs to have in it. IIRC, 0.93 should be the latest. Its fully stable and the developers have been hassled for a while to label it a stable release. But Linux boots fine? Stick with it, you'll get it.... Chill.	Chilling_Silently (228)
210369	2004-01-29 10:24:00	Ah, well, you know... considering it'd be a bit hard to browse from Runlevel 3... :D On Primary IDE Channel, the Master disk is where Windows is located. First partition is NTFS (XP is installed here), second NTFS also (documents, etc), and the final one FAT32 (multimedia). These should be /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2, and /dev/hda3 respectively. The Slave disk is where Linux is located, my partition layout first up has /boot, then the swap partition, then root (/), and then a FAT32 partition (backups, misc stuff I really ought to sort through). However, during partitioning for Arch Linux, the FAT32 partition is said to be /dev/discs/disc1/part1 (most likely because it is already present? /boot, swap, and root get assigned part2, part3, and part4 respectively. I always try to install the boot loader for whatever distro I use on the MBR of the Slave drive - although the Linux boot loaders can automatically detect and load Windows, if anything goes wrong it's quicker for me to change the boot order in the BIOS back to the Master drive, as opposed to inserting the XP setup CD and running fixmbr in repair mode. Hence, as Grub is installed on the MBR of the Slave drive, it detects that drive as hd0. The Master drive is then detected as hd1. Because I've gone through every Grub configuration I could think of (not many ;)), I installed Mandrake 9.0 to see what they put in menu.lst (and as I said, Arch Linux also uses menu.lst; it does not appear to be a symlink). Interestingly enough (or perhaps not), the entry to boot off the first partition on the Master drive (as said, where XP is installed) was ordered differently: root (hd0,0) makeactive chainloader +1 Please don't get confused; it says (hd0,0) because I installed Mandrake in standard mode, and hence did not get to chose where the boot loader went - it overwrote XP's. So I have yet to reinstall Arch Linux, but when I do, I will most certainly try the following entry: rootnoverify (hd1) makeactive chainloader +1 And if that doesn't work, I'll fix any screwups and remove the makeactive line. And if that doesn't work, I'll use (hd1,0), and if it still won't work, I'll repeat using plain root as opposed to rootnoverify. Surely I'll find a working solution somewhere :)	agent (30)
210370	2004-01-29 10:38:00	Dont play around with settings for booting off HDD XYZ etc.. It breaks stuff.... Leave it set to boot from hda and install the boot loader into the MBR. It'll then install it onto your hda's MBR. This is how it should be! From there, it'll automatically pick up WinXP's boot loader (Which will be automatically booting XP and not showing the boot menu) so you'll be fine!!!! Leave things that way.. It works.... Its simple... Change the boot order for installing Arch Linux so it looks for the CD-Rom, then hda, then hdc... Whatever you do, let it install into hda's MBR. If worst comes to work, boot off a Bootable floppy and fdisk /mbr the MBR away! Hope this helps Chill.	Chilling_Silently (228)
210371	2004-01-30 07:38:00	If you are stuck on this why not try to do it the other way round - use the Windows boot loader to do the job. 1. Restore the Windows boot sector using recovery console. 2. Use floppy disk to boot to Linux and write GRUB or LILO to the root partition rather than the MBR. 3. Use the following command to make an image of the first 512 bytes: dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/mnt/floppy/linux.bin bs=512 count=1 - replace hda2 with your root partition 4. Restart Windows and copy the file linux.bin to the root of the c:\ drive 5. Modify boot.ini to have the line: C:\linux.bin = "Linux" Used this method yesterday and it worked fine.	JohnD (509)
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