[Nottingham] Partition problem

[James Newell]

Dear All
 
firstly I just wanted to say hello. I have just started following the group and this is my first post.  I am a linux newbie based in Nottingham, working for IBM.  I have used Linux intermittantly in the past, but just recently been getting really into it with the latest generation of releases. (currently tried Gentoo stage 3 install, Mandrake 10 community, Suse 9.0 and fedora core 1, as well as lesser known peanut linux, Damn small and one floppy distros).  I really hope I can learn a lot more with you guys and maybe even beat the cucumber challenge !!
 
I saw the following problem and thought I'd throw in my two pence.  please dont flame me if it's generally wrong as it worked for me ;-):
 
I would have to say that I can sympathise with this problem.  I had the same symptoms.  when installing grub on my gentoo box i put it on the  physical disk where linux is located .  this caused problems when I wished to boot to windows XP, even though the (hdx,x) entries where correct
(windows was on the first physical disk, therefore (hd0,0) gentoo on the second therefore (hd1,0)
 
I found that if i switched the numbers around so that windows was (hd1,0) and gentoo was (hd0,0) and booted from the second disk (changed option in bios to HDD-1 instead of HDD-0) this worked flawlessly.
 
let us know how you got on.
 
James

Philip Scott <pgs31 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
Hmm,

Ignoring your partition-overlapping problem for a second (I don't _think_ it's 
what's causing this, it just looks like whatever it was that set them up did 
not have the correct drive geometry - I don't think (well, hope at least ;) 
installing fedora would have fiddled with them, and it doesn't seem to be 
fatal.)

If you can mount hda2 and hda3, then it seems strange to think that hda1 would 
be unmountable if you had ntfs support.

Here is a possible answer - which drive do you boot off (you can change this 
in the bios)? Has Grub inadvertently been installed on your windows partition 
(which would explain why you just get Grub back up again). When you press 
enter, does it move your selection back up to the top, in an 
i've-just-loaded-myself-again sort of fashion?

I find the grub drive numbers to be a bit.. strange, for me they change around 
when I fiddle with settings in the bios. When you get to the grub screen, you 
should be able to get to a grub console - you can then check that the hd(0,0) 
is indeed the partition you think it is by trying something like

more(hd0,0)/

And then pressing tab to try and get it to autocomplete.

Before you resort to completely wiping hda, try booting of the XP CD, going to 
the recovery console thing - and there are commands to restore your boot 
record and mbr, they might be worth trying. I can't for the life of me 
remember what they are (I think you get a list by typing 'help'). It's 
'fixmbr' and 'fixboot' or something along those lines if I remember 
correctly.. 

Let us know how things go! (I'm not completely out of ideas yet..)

Regards,
Philip

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--
Murphy's Law: If something can go wrong, it will.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage.


		
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