Broken GRUB! How to fix?

[Alan Dayley]

On Tuesday 27 May 2003 10:00, Alan Dayley wrote:
> I am writing this via Knoppix.  Great thing that!  Now, to the problem.
>
> I have a dual boot system with Windows 2000 and Red Hat Linux 9.0.  Last
> night, after playing some games with my kids and burning CDs on a borrowed
> USB burner, Linux froze solid.  All I got was the caps-lock and scroll-lock
> keyboard LEDs blinking in unison.  I had to power down.
>
> The hard drive is 20GB setup like this:
> hda1=FAT32 Windows 2000 ~ 6GB
> hda2=EXT3 /boot ~ 500MB
> hda3=EXT3 / ~ 12GB
> hda4=SWAP ~ the rest
>
> I have setup the dual boot according to these instructions
> http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux/grub-w2k-HOWTO.html.  This puts GRUB
> on the first sector of the /boot partition and enters the LInux boot block
> as an entry for the Windows 2000 boot loader.  It has been working fine. 
> When it works right, this is what happens:
>
> 1-Windows 2000 boot loader asks for the OS.  I choose Linux.
> 2-The GRUB boot loader text flashes in the upper left corner of the screen
> for a moment and then the GRUB menu comes up.
> 3-I select the kernel I want to boot and up it comes.
>
> After the disaster above, when I select Linux at step 1, I can see the word
> GRUB start to print in the upper left but then the computer reboots!
>
> So far I have discovered:
> - The drive is removable and inserting another 20GB drive with Windows 98
> and Linux will boot either just fine so I don't think the system hardware
> is to blame.
> - The Windows 2000 partition on the problem drive boots up and runs fine.
> - Booting from the Red Hat 9.0 install CD in rescue mode allows me to get
> to the partitions.  "fsck -t ext3 -r /dev/hda2" and on hda3 complete very
> quickly and report no errors.
> - The /dev/hda3/etc/grub.conf file looks fine.
>
> I think I need to re-install GRUB back on the first sector of /boot
> (/dev/hda2) but I don't know how.  I have all of Knoppix at my disposal but
> I need some direction on how to proceed.  Any helps out there?
>
> Alan

Good news!  I am back up.  Bad news!  I don't know yet why it broke.

As part of the setup for a Windows 2000 and Linux dual boot setup, the boot 
sector of the /boot partition must be copied to a file and then placed in the 
root directory of the Windows 2000 partition for the Win2k boot loader to 
execute.  I recopied that sector to the file and now I am back up.

Now I have some logs to sort through to find out why the problem happened in 
the first place.  I hope my hardware is not going flakey!

Alan