I need help please

[Thomas Webb]

I just installed Windows XP, and I have debian installed before, but now grub won't load and I cant boot linux. can anyone help me please??

[oosterhouse]

You need to re-do the grub bootloader.

[oz]

Yeah, Windows will overwrite grub everytime, so you'll need to reinstall grub as pointed out by oosterhouse.

There are quite a few ongoing threads here about reinstalling grub, so if you'll do a search, you should be able to find them. Otherwise, you can use a Knoppix CD to install grub to your mbr again.

[oosterhouse]

I saw your reply and I was wondering, how would you install Grub from the Knoppix LiveCD? It wouldn't install Knoppix itself at all? Only Grub?

[oz]

I saw your reply and I was wondering, how would you install Grub from the Knoppix LiveCD? It wouldn't install Knoppix itself at all? Only Grub?

This should work:

Boot the Knoppix CD and go to a terminal, then determine the root partition of your linux system, and mount it "dev" option enabled, with write permissions.

If the filesystem isn't mounted you'll need to mount it like this (be sure to change "hda1" and "hda" to match the root location/device in your own system):

sudo mount -o dev,rw /mnt/hda1

if it's already mounted, remount it like this:

sudo mount -o remount,dev,rw /mnt/hda1

now, restore grub like this:

sudo chroot /mnt/hda1 grub-install /dev/hda

if the chroot method doesn't work, try remounting as outlined above and do:

sudo grub-install -root-directory=/mnt/hda1 /dev/hda

[Thomas Webb]

I need to completely re-install grub... or lilo. How can I do that?

[oosterhouse]

I think it works off a cd just go to http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/ and it should explain how to do it somewhere.

[oosterhouse]

Or get a Knoppix livecd and do as ozar said.