The Curse of Linux and Grub

[The PIT]

I've got a dual boot system with Suse 10.1

Suse at the moment is broken becuase I've changed the Graphics card and it basically needs configuring. however that isn't the main problem.

I need to update my XP disk as this is getting full. This is the first disk. Even if I clone sector by sector I cannot boot into Windows and get a chainloader error message which is basically saying it can't see the drive properly. (Possibly becuase the Sata drive is detected as CHS)

If I try and remove the Bootloader by the XP recovery console by using fixmbr and fixboot and just get missing operating system even though all the files are there. Boot.ini etc.

Is there a sure way of getting rid of grub altogther and having a single boot system??

[Marshmallowman]

Do you replace the original drive with the copied drive in exactly the same location?(cable)

If necessary you can try to get grub to alter where a drive appears to the OS, eg to match your boot.ini

[The PIT]

Yes everything was the same. Looking on the other forums it seems that one of the problems is that the drive was being detected as CHS.

I've taken the hard drive to work securly erased it and installed an OS there and it worked. Coming back home I reinstalled the drive and it's been detected as LBA. At the moment I'm doing a restore via image and just replacing everything on the new drive. So in theory it should boot Grub free when it's finnished.

[Kooldino]

try fdisk /mbr?

[The PIT]

try fdisk /mbr?

Well the problem stemmed from partition magic fixing the bios detection to CHS on the new drive. Once it was "stuck that way" there was no changing it back and neither linux or Windows would boot.

Luckily WD wipe disk tool cured that.

The copying of the old system over the blank bootable drive didn't work as Winxp lost all it's file extensions. Anyway another ghost restore fixed that and then there was no problem removing grub as the hard drive was correctly detected in the bios.

Stage two was cloning again which worked.

The only problem now is the old drive has been forced to CHS so it looks like another WD job on that at sometime. Grrrrr. Software shouldn't be allowed to change the Bios settings of the drive.

[spadnos]

Well the problem stemmed from partition magic fixing the bios detection to CHS on the new drive. Once it was "stuck that way" there was no changing it back and neither linux or Windows would boot.

Luckily WD wipe disk tool cured that.

The copying of the old system over the blank bootable drive didn't work as Winxp lost all it's file extensions. Anyway another ghost restore fixed that and then there was no problem removing grub as the hard drive was correctly detected in the bios.

Stage two was cloning again which worked.

The only problem now is the old drive has been forced to CHS so it looks like another WD job on that at sometime. Grrrrr. Software shouldn't be allowed to change the Bios settings of the drive.

It's probably not changing the BIOS settings. You likely have the BIOS set to "Auto". Set that to LBA (if you can), and that should eliminate the CHS problem.

Also, when at the grub boot menu, you can get a grub command prompt (hit esc, I think). From the prompt, you can find specific files, see what partitions exist, etc. There's a grub manual at gnu.org. Once you get it to boot, you would then need to change the /boot/grub/menu.lst file so it has the new boot info. (this will depend on what has changed)

Hope this helps
- Steve