Okay, I have Windows on c: and linux on a second hard drive. I installed windows first, then linux and used grub to switch between the two. Problem is, my hard drive with linux on has gone kaplooey but grub won''t let me run windows because it wants to read the second hard drive. all it does is say "Loading grub" and then sits there. Anyone know how I can fix this? I KNOW i have a hard drive full of information, as well as a bootable operating system, because i used my red hat linux boot cd rescue mode and managed to mount it. Incidentally, it recognises a hdb, as does my bios, it just doesn''t seem to be functioning. As a second question : I just replaced my computer case and transferred everything over. could i have forgotten anything that might stop my drive working (My psu blew up after i moved it here) Thanks!

If you can get into your system using a boot disk to get into a dos environment then you can clean your boot loader section of the HD with a default one with the command ''fdisk /mbr'' I found a page talking about it here if you are interested: http://www.claws-and-paws.com/virus/articles/fdisk.shtml This will kill grub and your system will be like linux was never installed (as far as the C drive is concerned).

-SirKnight

Thanks a lot, I guess I might have to resort to that. It''s weird, none of the booters i have tried recognise the second hard disk, other than the red hat rescue cd mode. Pity that''s almost unreadable.

I don''t know how much grub resembles lilo, but when lilo does something like that, you can just run lilo again (/sbin/lilo /sbin is often not in your path because it contains programs that are dangerous, or it''s only in root''s path because normally only root can run the programs)

If you''re running Windows NT (up through 2000, IIRC, and maybe XP pro), it rejects any bootloader other than its own, and things like this are the result.

Also, make sure you haven''t updated the kernel without rerunning grub (once again, I don''t know if this is specific to Lilo or if it carries over to grub). Basically anything that changes the inode of the kernel (assuming /boot is ext2 or 3) under lilo can cause lilo to crash like that.

If that doesn''t work, find one of the rescue disks and fsck your filesystem. If it''s journaled, it may exit when it sees that the journal is okay. You''ll have to look up the command-line switch that forces it to check anyway.

As for what you could have done to cause this, the only thing I could think of would be reordering the hard drives, but I don''t think you''d get that far. A single IDE cable can hook up to two drives. One jack is on the end, and one is along the length of the cable. If you switch which hard drive is on which, it affects the order in which your bios checks for bootloaders. So I suppose if you had installed grub on that 2nd hard drive on a previous install, then changed your setup so that the old grub no longer pointed to a valid kernel, but made a new grub on the other hard drive, then switched the ports of the IDE cable where the two hard drives are located so that the bios finds the old grub first, which no longer points to a valid kernel, the old grub would stall upon looking for the kernel. If that''s the case, then the cure is simply to switch which hard drive is on which IDE port.

Heheh stupid me. I actually worked that out last night. For some reason my main hard drive is the slave on the first ide cable. I had assumed that my main hard drive would be the master!

Maybe i''m losing some speed on it because of that (Though i RARELY use both drives at once)