GRUB will not reinstall

[lightford]

Hello all,

First time poster here!

I have been working through the process of installing XP after installing Ubuntu 10.04 on a clean slate. XP is now installed and, of course, I can only boot to it since the MBR was overwritten. SO, I am now following the GRUB 2 restore method found here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RecoveringUbuntuAfterInstallingWindows

Everything works well until I reach the grub-install portion of the instructions, at which point I receive this error:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo grub-install --root-directory=/media/yada yada for my main Ubuntu partition /dev/sda1
/usr/sbin/grub-setup: warn: Attempting to install GRUB to a partition instead of the MBR. This is a BAD idea..
~
~More errors and warnings referring to blocklists
~

So, am I getting this error because I am trying to install to /dev/sda1 instead of just /dev/sda? I chose /dev/sda1 since that is the reference I received during the mount | tail -1 command.

Looking at my hard drive in Disk Utility while booted in the 10.04 Live CD I see that Ubuntu is installed to /dev/sda1, XP is on /dev/sda2 and the Extended and Swap partitions are on /dev/sda3 and sda5 respectively.

I appreciate your help on this!
Jake

[andrewthomas]

Use the instructions here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2#Reinstalling%20from%20LiveCD

and yes, you do want to install grub to sda and not sda1

From the information you provided


sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

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

[Rubi1200]

If the method suggested by andrewthomas does not work, then try this:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1581099

[lightford]

Well that was easy enough. Now I am just working on getting GRUB to recognize XP. And it appears a simple update of GRUB allowed it to recognize XP. Awesome! Thank you for the quick help.