Sunday, December 9. 2007
This will restore grub if you had it before and was hosed by a windows install. Windows overwrites the MBR so grub doesnt appear anymore, hence, you cannot boot ubuntu any longer.
1. boot an ubuntu or any other live cd
2. open a terminal and type sudo grub
3. enter your root password
4. next type find /boot/grub/stage1
5. it should return something like (hdx,x) with the x being numbers representing your drive,partition.
6. type this in terminal with the x's being output from #4
root (hdx,x)
7. now type setup(hd0)
8. type quit
9. if you got any errors like failed, but not fatal, reboot and try again from #1, worked for me.
**now to find your windows partition, and give it an entry in grub do the following
1. in a terminal type df -h
2. look for windows partition in the output
3. hard drive partitions start from zero so if it said 2 its partition 1, just subtract 1 from whatever it says in output.
4. in terminal type gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
5. go to the end of the file and look for the last entry showing ubuntu kernels, and add the following after last unbuntu kernel.
6. title windows xp
root (hd0,x)
makeactive
chainloader +1
now remember, the x is the partition windows is on. if it said 2 in output from df -h then put 1 here. if it said 3 then put 2, and so on.
7. save menu.lst, and reboot. when grub starts it should give you a list of os to start, you might have to hit , if it shows too fast, then go back to menu.lst and look for timeout, and change this to a higher number. good luck.
