Where does GRUB reside?

[efoneil]

I have a dual boot pc (windows 98SE)/linux (Mandrake 9.0 distro) that uses GRUB to determine boot drive. Windows is on my primary master drive with no partitions and nothing else on that drive and my Mandrake linux is on my second hard drive (primary slave) that has a 15 Gb partition as a backup drive for the windows drive and the other 45 Gb contains the Linux os.

The other day, for no reason I can determine, instead of displaying my options for booting GRUB displayed the following error "GRUB geom error" and then just hung there not allowing me to boot anywhere. I have since found out that I had a hard disc crash on the primary slave drive. So I have to loose all my backup data and my linux install.

My question is where is GRUB installed? Is it on the primary slave that has crashed or is it installed on the primary master ?

Any help will assist me in recovering the data on the win98 drive.

[Muser]

GRUB (and LILO) have all of the configuration files and such on your Linux drive, but is installed on the MBR (master boot record) of your master drive. For example, my Windows hard drive (hda1) has LILO on its boot record but in order for it run it must read the config files on my Linux drive (hdb1). In short its you Linux drive that's screwed up, because if it was your Windows one, the GRUB error message wouldn't even display and your computer would boot to a blinking cursor and be pretty useless.

[efoneil]

Thanks linkinp4rk410

I suspected as much. Because my linux drive is crashed (western digital has confirmed it is a fatal error) I will loose all my linux data but I was able to overwrite grub with a PC command "fdisk /mbr" that creates a clean master boot record on the PC drive and was able to get back to that data

Thanks

[Johann]

hI efonail!
How did you exactly do that? I tried booting with a Win98-Startdisk on CD, it allowed me to boot, but after I did fdisk /mbr it hasn´t changed anything. On next reboot Grub Geom Error again.

I run XP Pro and Suse 9.2

thanks for your help,

Johann

[loft306]

hI efonail!
How did you exactly do that? I tried booting with a Win98-Startdisk on CD, it allowed me to boot, but after I did fdisk /mbr it hasn´t changed anything. On next reboot Grub Geom Error again.

I run XP Pro and Suse 9.2

thanks for your help,
Johann

heh... check if you have the mbr locked in BIOS

[Johann]

hmm, when entering the BIOS, there is a password section, in which it says "Lock bios settings" and the current setting is disabled. This was the easy to change chance you were talking about, right? :cry:
There is also something called IBM Predesktop Area. Does that have anything to do with it?

Cheers, buddy,

Johann