NT grub go bye-bye

kunix84 wrote:

hi, ken here

i had fedora for about 3 months, then some idiot got a hold of my PC and tried to install NT. now im stuck with a blasted grub shell that won't go away, no matter how many times i reinstall fedora.

tried:
-partitioning
-boot sector
-ms dos
-installing other os(2000,98,95)

grub still stays

please help!

well, to blast the MBR, boot any recent Linux Live Boot CD. at the shell prompt, do:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

or /dev/sda, or whatever is your drive that contains grub. bye bye grub. hello, non-booting computer! now install OS du jour...

Boot from Fedora CD/DVD/USB/Etc
Choose "rescue installed system", then customise regional parametresand agree with parametres.
Then as the user "root" replace the root directory:

#chroot /mnt/{YOUR_SYSTEM}

if root section was not mounted it is necessary mount to the previous command.
Then rescue grub:

#grub-install --no-floppy /dev/{YOUR_SYSTEM_DRIVE}

for example:

#grub-install --no-floppy /dev/sda

Well that's fine if he doesn't mind losing his partition table!

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1

Would just remove the code in the MBR, not the partition records. If you have inadvertantly done this ken, you can use 'gpart' to scan your disk for partitions and rebuild the partition table.

I would also wipe out the first 512 bytes of any partitions (although not the first 512 bytes of a type '5' extended!) as this will remove bootloaders from them too (sometimes called PBR, or 'Partition Boot Record').

If you still can't remove it, it might be the result of a dying hard disk - I once had an old 850mb drive refuse to accept the DOS bootloader on the MBR, insisting on loading LILO instead (I was trying to re-use the disk in another machine) - even though the filesystem containing the kernel had long gone!

Why wont' fedora start, is it because there is no boot loader on the system or is it because there is an internal problem with fedora itself that was was shown after the bootloader?

Gossamer wrote:

I'd hate to think you've already raped your HDD from all that partitioning.

Or at least the last few bytes in the MBR which define the partition 'borders' :P