Need help! grub

[bdog676 0]

Hi-

I had 2 partitions. 1 with windows xp and 1 with fedora. I used the loader grub. I was running out of hard drive space so I formatted the fedora partition from within windows and restarted my computer. Well that was stupid. The computer displays GRUB:

and won't boot to windows or anything. I try restoring the MBR from the windows CD and it starts booting windows but displays

autochk program not found. skipping autocheck.

Then it just starts to reboot completely.

Luckily I have norton systemworks which restores the grub.

That was last week and I've been working on this since. I bought a new computer because my graphics card also went out and mine was getting old. I need to get some of the files from the old windows partition. It has some irreplaceable pictures of my family and my wife will kill me. I've tried putting the old drive in the new computer as "slave" and it does the same thing. Please help.

 

 

~Jason

[danleff 0]

Can you explain in a little more detail what you are doing?

 

Quote:

I formatted the fedora partition from within windows and restarted my computer. Well that was stupid. The computer displays GRUB:

and won't boot to windows or anything.

 

If you erase the Fedora partition, you delete the /boot/grub directory, which Grub references to boot the system properly.

 

 

Quote:

Luckily I have norton systemworks which restores the grub.

 

I don't think that Norton's does this, does it? Can you explain?

 

Also, how did you attempt to recover the MBR exactly, on the old drive?

 

 

Quote:

I need to get some of the files from the old windows partition. It has some irreplaceable pictures of my family and my wife will kill me. I've tried putting the old drive in the new computer as "slave" and it does the same thing.

 

Can you explain what exactly that you are doing? Are you trying to boot Windows from the new computer by changing the bios boot order to the slave drive? If the Windows bootloader is trashed, you can't do this.

 

If the new system is attempting to boot right off from the slave drive, without you doing anything to tell it to do so, it is not jumpered correctly, or it is on the incorrect channel on the hard drive ide ribbon connection.

 

What OS is on the new computer? If nothing and you are trying to boot the system off the old drive, jumpered as slave, this will not work. Windows still thinks that it is on the primary master and the Windows boot.ini file still is trying to point there.

 

If your pictures are on the Windows partition on the old drive, you can just use My Computer to navigate to the old windows partition and get your files. That assumes that you did not trash the Windows partition on this drive by mistake.

[bdog676 0]

If you erase the Fedora partition, you delete the /boot/grub directory, which Grub references to boot the system properly.

 

This is what I did, but it still boots to the GRUB command line.

 

Quote:

Luckily I have norton systemworks which restores the grub.

 

I don't think that Norton's does this, does it? Can you explain?

 

I think it restored the mbr which had grub. When it boots, it displays

GRUB:

 

Also, how did you attempt to recover the MBR exactly, on the old drive?

I booted from the winxp install cd and tried to do a recovery install with the fixmbr. I also tried booting from a win98 bootdisk to get to dos. Then I tried fdisk /mbr. Neither of these worked.

 

Can you explain what exactly that you are doing? Are you trying to boot Windows from the new computer by changing the bios boot order to the slave drive? If the Windows bootloader is trashed, you can't do this.

 

If the new system is attempting to boot right off from the slave drive, without you doing anything to tell it to do so, it is not jumpered correctly, or it is on the incorrect channel on the hard drive ide ribbon connection.

 

What OS is on the new computer? If nothing and you are trying to boot the system off the old drive, jumpered as slave, this will not work. Windows still thinks that it is on the primary master and the Windows boot.ini file still is trying to point there.

 

If your pictures are on the Windows partition on the old drive, you can just use My Computer to navigate to the old windows partition and get your files. That assumes that you did not trash the Windows partition on this drive by mistake.

Quote:

quoted text

 

 

I am not trying to boot from the old drive. The new system is running windows xp media center. I don't think it's trying to boot from the slave drive. The new computer will not load if the old drive is installed.

[danleff 0]

Quote:

This is what I did, but it still boots to the GRUB command line.

Luckily I have norton systemworks which restores the grub.

I don't think that Norton's does this, does it? Can you explain?

I think it restored the mbr which had grub. When it boots, it displays
GRUB:

Correct. The bootloader for Grub is still on the MBR of what is the slave drive now, so If you try to boot from the slave drive, then you just get the Grub text line. it does not have the reference files that were on the Linux partition.

Quote:

I am not trying to boot from the old drive. The new system is running windows xp media center. I don't think it's trying to boot from the slave drive. The new computer will not load if the old drive is installed.

Correct again. So, then you said;

Quote:

I've tried putting the old drive in the new computer as "slave" and it does the same thing. Please help.

So this led me to belive that you were trying to boot off the slave drive and getting the grub text line.

I assume that the pictures that you are trying to recover are still on a Windows partition on the slave drive?

If so, then can you see the Windows partition on the slave drive in My Computer and access the files you need to recover? There should be a drive designation in My Computer for this partition.

[bdog676 0]

So this led me to belive that you were trying to boot off the slave drive and getting the grub text line.

 

I assume that the pictures that you are trying to recover are still on a Windows partition on the slave drive?

 

If so, then can you see the Windows partition on the slave drive in My Computer and access the files you need to recover? There should be a drive designation in My Computer for this partition.

 

 

I am not trying to boot from the slave drive. Yes the pictures are on a NTFS partition. But the new computer will not boot if I have the old drive in. It displays GRUB:

I don't see why this would matter since it's marked as slave. If I remove the old drive, the computer works fine. If I could get to windows, I could copy the files. Does it matter if one drive is SATA and the other is pata?

[danleff 0]

Yes, it does. I assume the new computer has the sata drive and the slave is pata.

 

Look in the bios and see what the boot order is.

 

There are two parts to this. One is the actual boot order of the drives, say cdrom as the first, hdd0 as the second...

 

The other section is what type of drive boots first. Is the bios set to detect sata first, or pata first? It should show an order, such as;

 

scsi, ide.....

 

or;

 

ide, scsi...

 

If that order show ide first, then the bios attempts to boot any ide drive first. If scsi or sata, than the sata drives are detected first.

 

If you are usure, post what motherboard make and model that this is, so we can look at the bios setup for your system.

[bdog676 0]

Thanks so much. I am copying the pictures from the old drive as I type. You really saved me here. Thanks a lot!