On Wed, 2008-04-16 at 10:24 -0400, max bianco wrote: > Well I did start in the middle or rather I eliminated many (i felt at > 10:30pm)unnecessary details. The dell laptop used to have XP > installed. There is a button called the Dell Media Direct Button, its > about 2 inches to the left of the power button. I pressed > it(unintentionally) instead of power and subsequently it went looking > for windows and didn't find it. It hosed the graphical grub. I > rebooted and got a grub terminal. At this stage you need to know which partitions are which. You want to know the MBR the BIOS reads to try booting an OS. You want to know the partition where /boot is. GRUB counts from zero, not one. The first drive is drive zero (hd0), the first partition is partition zero (hd0,0). Once you've got yourself at a usable GRUB prompt, the command sequence to get things back again is *like* this: Set where /boot is with the root command (GRUB's root, not the OS root). Here, it's 1st drive, 2nd partition. e.g. root (hd0,1) Set where the MBR will be written with the setup command. Here, it's to the 1st drive. e.g. setup (hd0) Write the changes with the quit command. root (hd0,1) setup (hd0) quit Three commands, and you're done. You may be able to do it from that GRUB prompt, you may have to boot into a rescue disc and work from there (issue the grub command to get into a GRUB shell, then those commands). The drives won't need to be mounted to do this, you're not writing files to a filesystem, you're writing to the bootblocks. Read the grub info file, rather than the man file, if you need more information about it. Or Google for: restoring GRUB -- (This computer runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, in case that's important to the thread.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
