[Wolves] Hello - first post from me !

Andy Wootton andy.wootton at wyrley.demon.co.uk
Thu May 5 21:57:01 BST 2005


Tim Childe wrote:

>...
>Realising it was now after midnight (by a long way) I decided to stuff
>linux and get windows back - so I booted off a Win98 boot floppy, and
>fdisk /mbr 'd it.
>
>Now on reboot it went to the disk and just went
>
>GRUB
>
>I rebooted from floppy and tried to access my c drive and got the not
>formatted error (general failure reading drive c) which is when I
>checked with fdisk and saw it was type UNKNOWN
>  
>
I've seen the GRUB message when I've wiped the bootable partition but 
GRUB is still in the MBR.

When you install Grub you have a choice of installing it on a partition 
(to be picked by the bootable flag using FDISK) or on the MBR
Is there any chance you installed it onto your Win partition? That might 
mean the original MBR still exists but is jumping to where it expected 
to find Win but would find a non-functioning Grub instead. Windows 
wouldn't know what to make of it so would say it was type unknown. This 
is only a theory and I don't know how to get Windows back if I'm right.

The best way forward would seem to be:
a) Change the boot flag using your Win98 boot floppy to anything that 
might boot
or
b)  Iinstall Grub on the MBR and get it booting your Linux partition. 
Please don't do anythng without a second opinion. I'm far from confident 
that I'm right.

Woo



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