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Right now I'm running windowsxphome/fedora core 1. My boot loader is grub. I have fedora on my second hard drive and I'm planning on installing openBSD over it.I don't have a floppy drive and my windows xp cd was destroyed by my dog a long time ago. I've been planning my install out for the past week and I just need a little help on the boot problem. I can not lose my windows install because I don't have the disk anymore and I don't have the disk to do fixmbr.
I'm still working on the Gordian knot, thanks...
How specific is the XP Recovery Console? Can a store bought full version of XP be used?
I am not fully understanding the problem.
Is GRUB loaded on the XP drive, or is it loaded on the FedoraCore 1 drive?
Which drive is booted first by the BIOS ?
How are the drives set up; primary/master and primary/slave, or is one a secondary, and which are which?
When using separate drives for each OS ( which is easy ) I usually like to install Windows on the primary drive first, then change it to a slave or secondary drive and make the Linux drive the primary/master, then using GRUB to boot to either: If I want to remove the Linux OS for any reason I just pull the drive and make the Windows drive the master/slave again, thus eliminating any need to change anything as far as boot loaders. If I want to replace the Linux version/distro, I merely have to format the Linux drive, reload, then set up GRUB on the new distro to boot Windows ( the second drive. ) ( Or one could set the BIOS to boot to the Windows drive first if that is an option available, depending on the original setup.)
The only time I ever loaded GRUB ( or Lilo ) on the Windows drive was if I was installing more then one OS on a single drive. With the newer hardware, even that is made simpler as the Windows OS can sit on the first partition nicely by itself, and GRUB can be loaded on a second with the new OS; make the second partition active and not the first, and BANG!, you now have the GRUB boot loader at start-up, but can at any time go back and make the first ( Windows ) partition active and it boots directly into Windows.
So I think what I am saying is, to make this brief, could you supply details of your architecture and your grub.conf files so we might understand what you are facing? There are other alternatives out there ( like using win2k install disks ) to doing repairs besides the original install disks, but to offer a proper solution one needs to know what the problem is.
BTW, anyone else's browser hanging up on view.atdmt.com ??
If it is the standard recovery console then it should work without any problems.
Where you might have issues is with non-standard disks from brand name manufacturers.
I would just borrow a CD and make a copy. MS licence software, they are NOT CD vendors. You have a product key.
Otherwise I think they charge $25 for a replacement CD
Another solution could simply be to install OpenBSD on another physical HD and the use the bios as a selection tool. Primary HD:1 = windows, Primary HD:2 = OpenBSD.
/chris
Two harddrives on one controller. Windows is on the first hard drive[set to master]. It has 10gb for the main partition and two 15 gb partitions for other stuff. All of the first drive is NTFS. THe second drive has Fedora. It's split up in this order 204mb for boot, 10gb for /root, 8gb /home, 800mb for swap, 500 mb fat32 because I couldn't get online with linux to update to read ntfs, and 19.5gb free space. The second partition is all ext3 where not stated otherwise.
If I just swapped the windows harddrive to slave would it be safe? I have a win2k install disk just no key for it. If I'd just gone with lilo I could of reverted back to the old mbr but as far as I can tell with grub it deletes the old record. I've been up for a couple of days so I'm probably just overthinking this.
# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
# root (hd1,0)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hdb3
# initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=1
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd1,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
password --md5 $1$ujuihAwz$v88UJAUWQ9OsD0eaH.eMQ/
title Fedora Core (2.4.22-1.2115.nptl)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi rhgb
initrd /initrd-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl.img
title DOS
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
If the BIOS is set to boot to the second drive first ( the Linux drive or hd1), then all you need to do is change the boot order in the BIOS.
If your BIOS is set to boot to the primary/master ( XP drive, or hd0 ) then grub did get loaded onto it.
In this case, can't you just boot to the win2k CD and run fixmbr on the xp dirve?
You would not be installing win2k onto the drive ( and don't install the Recovery Console onto the drive either ), just using recovery features.
Haven't done it in several years, but have used a win2kpro disk to repair xp MBR in the past .... just make sure it is win2k and not an old NT disk.
Again, haven't done it in years, and anyone correct this if need be, but this seems right ...
from Windows 2000 ERD and Recovery Console
Once you get everything going again, may I suggest you make the XP drive a secondary and put the new OS on the primary? That way any new boot loader and the new OS will be on the same drive and not touch the XP drive at all.Quote:
To restore your system with the Emergency Repair Process:
* Use the W2K CD to start your computer. If you have a computer that cannot start up from a CD-ROM, use the Windows 2000 Setup disks instead.
* At the Setup Notification screen, press ENTER to continue.
* At the Welcome to Setup screen, press R to select the option to repair a Windows 2000 installation.
* When prompted to choose the type of repair or recovery option required, press R to repair a Windows 2000 installation by using the Emergency Repair Process.
* Choose the type of repair option you want to use:
Press M for Manual Repair...
Just a thought.
Actually I was thinking about using NTLDR to boot XP and BSD. My main problem was that I didn't have the XP disk and I don't have a floppy drive. Everything I read said XP recovery disk and I read for a couple of days before I asked. THanks to y'all though I know 2K will work.
Here's documentation on using NTLDR to boot windows 2K/xp/NT and openBSD if anybody comes looking around this thread later on:
It's from: http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#MultibootingQuote:
Windows NT/2000/XP NTLDR
To multiboot OpenBSD and Windows NT/2000/XP, you can use NTLDR, the boot loader that NT uses. To multi-boot with NT, you need a copy of your OpenBSD Partition Boot Record (PBR). After running installboot, you can copy it to a file using dd(1), following a process similar to:
# dd if=/dev/rsd0a of=openbsd.pbr bs=512 count=1
Note: this is a really good time to remind you that blindly typing commands in you don't understand is a really bad idea. This line will not work directly on most computers. It is left to the reader to adapt it to their machine.
Now boot NT and put openbsd.pbr in C:. Add a line like this to the end of C:\BOOT.INI:
c:\openbsd.pbr="OpenBSD"
When you reboot, you should be able to select OpenBSD from the NT loader menu. There is much more information available about NTLDR at the NTLDR Hacking Guide.
On Windows XP you can also edit the boot information using the GUI; see the XP Boot.ini HOWTO.
Programs that do much of this for you are available, for example, BootPart. This program can be run from Windows NT/2000/XP, and will fetch the OpenBSD PBR, place it on your NT/2000/XP partition, and will add it to C:\BOOT.INI
Note: The Windows NT/2000/XP boot loader is only capable of booting OSs from the primary hard drive. You can not use it to load OpenBSD from the second drive on a system.
I'm planning on starting this tomorrow so if anybody sees any flaws in it let me know and thanks for the help.
You might try Bart PE:
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/
You DO need an XP or Win2003 cd to compile one yourself, but
there's plenty of PE iso's for the downloading via torrents that
would certainly do the job.
Also found this tonight surfin' Slax's site:
http://www.slax.org/doc_troubleshoot.php#fixmbr
Quote:
I'm planning on starting this tomorrow so if anybody sees any flaws in it let me know
Good luck with it.Quote:
Note: The Windows NT/2000/XP boot loader is only capable of booting OSs from the primary hard drive. You can not use it to load OpenBSD from the second drive on a system.