Solved: lost grub after xp reinstall

[phatsteve]

Re: lost grub after xp reinstall

OK, 1st ide hdd (vista) now disconnected

output of fdisk now is:
fdisk -lu

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80025280000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders, total 156299375 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x76d876d8

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 63 103731704 51865821 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 103731705 154223999 25246147+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 154224000 156296384 1036192+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdb: 250.0 GB, 250058268160 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders, total 488395055 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x8e0a8ddc

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 63 488392064 244196001 7 HPFS/NTFS

result of livcd find stage1 is now:

grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
(hd0,1)

grub> setup (hd0)

Error 12: Invalid device requested

grub>

Some progress but now I'm stuck?

[Qqmike]

Re: lost grub after xp reinstall

root (hd0,1)
setup (hd0)


(I'm sort of lost here, but let's give this a try ... did you for get the root statement?)

[phatsteve]

Re: lost grub after xp reinstall

spot on, in my excitement I forgot to issue root (hd0,1) command!
When I did, everything worked, reinstalled grub, re-booted and there everything was! Kubuntu,xp and vista, or course I now have to re-connect vista drive but that's the least of my problems.

Thankyou to all who have helped, I'm going to copy these instructions for future use, I'm bound to mess it up again sometime!

[dibl]

Re: lost grub after xp reinstall

Nice one!

It's good to see such success.

If you can edit your original post and add "SOLVED" to the title, it may help another lost soul, some day. Thanks!

[Qqmike]

Re: lost grub after xp reinstall

Yes, good work, phatsteve!


(Tech note:
when you hook everything back up, just be sure that the drive you called hd0 when you did this:
root (hd0,1)
setup (hd0)

That same drive must be the drive you set in BIOS to be the first-in-order boot drive.
You & dibl probably have this under control--and I admit to getting a bit lost back there--but just an fyi so we are all on the same page --Mike )

[dibl]

Re: lost grub after xp reinstall

Yes, good work, phatsteve!


(Tech note:
when you hook everything back up, just be sure that the drive you called hd0 when you did this:
root (hd0,1)
setup (hd0)

That same drive must be the drive you set in BIOS to be the first-in-order boot drive.
You & dibl probably have this under control--and I admit to getting a bit lost back there--but just an fyi so we are all on the same page --Mike )

Right you are, Mike.

When you reconnect the IDE drive, and then set BIOS to boot the SATA drive, it is possible that Grub will fail with a "partition not found" error. If so, it is because Grub is now sensing a new hard drive sequence, and the SATA drive is now (hd1). You can test that by simply pressing "e" to edit when the boot menu is presented and you have highlighted the Kubuntu menu item. Then you can change (hd0,1) to (hd1,1) and do a return and then a "b" to boot it. If it works, then you can use kate in root mode to do the permanent edits in /boot/grub/menu.lst. Don't forget to change it in groot=(hdx,x) as well.