A fine mess... Partition help.

[Nesaskewatch]

I found it! I was rooting around for some slugs for the shotgun, and found it!

I think I have the fixmbr.exe thing figured so I'll go ahead and do it then hopefully check back from inside xp.

Any issues I should watch for?

[ranch hand]

Well I would give the SG disk a look. The little looking I did at the site was kind of confusing but there was mention of one for windows. I think that you can install lillo on MS and have it boot.

I am looking for help on that. Don't panic yet.

[4Orbs]

I guess I'm screwed.

Well, I disagree. You COULD spend a couple more hours creating a storage partition from the unallocated space on your HDD and format it to NTFS, then use pysdm (storage device manager) in Ubuntu to mount the storage partition and easily change permissions, then copy all your most important files from the Windows partition over to the storage partition (of course you'd need to mount the Win partition in Ubuntu too). Then you could use SuperGrub to repair the MBR without fear of losing the important files you've put on the storage partition. Even if you completely destroy the Win and Ubuntu systems... the storage partition is still safe and you'd only need to re-install some OS to access that.

EDIT:
Uh-oh! Disregard that. I see you don't have any unallocated space left on the HDD.

EDIT #2:
But it's still a good idea, even if you get everything fixed.

[oleink]

results yet? I hope it worked

[Nesaskewatch]

Weird. I ran fixmbr, and it claimed to have written a new mbr, but xp still won't boot, and grub still appears to be working fine. Linux hasn't changed at all. I then went back into recovery and ran chkdsk /r just for the hell of it and it again claimed to have fixed errors, but still no go. I am wondering if when I resized xp I somehow moved some files that "cannot be moved"? There is another command in recovery that I think was fixboot or something like that. Maybe I should try that? Amazing how I have forgotten so much about windows. I used to be pretty good at wrecking xp.

Ideas?

[4Orbs]

???... Grub shouldn't even be there anymore. It must be booting into that mysterious grub that is installed inside the Windows partition.

[Nesaskewatch]

Fixboot worked! I am now in xp!! (Man. Is that a weird thing to be happy about!) I guess it's now just a matter of fixin grub up eh?

Would a simple

sudo update-grub

work?

Cheers very much you guys! I'm thinkin' I'm on the home stretch!



Of course updating grub won't work! I have to get into it first! How about booting into the live cd, then update grub?

[ranch hand]

This is great. Maybe I can sleep tonight.

You need to follow these directions;

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Grub2#Recove...20via%20LiveCD

ignoring the editing files part as "update-grub" will take care of that and the "grub-install /dev/sda" should put grub back on your MBR.

Do not add a partition number to the "sda". That, I think, is what happened to you MS boot sector. Just a plain "sda" is what we want here.

This should do it.

[Nesaskewatch]

Roger that. I have 2 partitions with 10.04, and the primary is xp. Where it says;

$ sudo fdisk -l

* Now, you need to remember which device listed is your linux distribution, for reference, /dev/sda1 will be used. Now we need to mount the filesystem to /mnt

$ sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

* If you have /boot on a separate partition, that need's to be mounted aswell. For reference, /dev/sda2 will be used.

$ sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/boot Make sure you don't mix these up, pay attention to the output of FDISK

* Now mount the rest of your devices

$ sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev

I don't want to list sda1 here right? I only want sda5 and sda7, correct? Does the swap need to be included? Does it matter which is boot? I'm a bit confused... To be safe, would you mind taking a boo at the pics of my drives posted previously and confirm what I should enter here? I don't have those pics on this os.

Cheers!

I hope I caught this in time. How about I do this;

sudo fdisk -l
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
sudo mount /dev/sda5 /mnt
sudo mount /dev/sda7 /mnt

Then I enter

sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda

Would that work OK?

[ranch hand]

NO. You only want sda5. What you are doing here is establishing a remote control of your OS that you want to supply the menu.

What they are talking about is if you have your OS installed on 2 (or 3) partitions and one of those is a boot partition. You do not have that.

When you get to the grub-install command is where you just want sda and no number at all.