Can't boot after removing Mandrake install disk

[matthewbarr]

Hi there,

Really hoping someone can help me with this. I have Mandrake 10.1 installed on a second hard drive in my Windows XP box and was happily dual booting between the two. Today I bought a large internal disk to copy a lot of my Windows stuff onto and so I removed the drive containing Mandrake and tried to boot to Windows (Windows was set as my default OS in Mandrake Boot Loader tool) with the new disk installed in place of the Mandrake disk.

However, with the Mandrake hard disk removed, Windows fails to boot at all - I get half a screen of 01 01 01... etc. at the point in the boot process where the blue Mandrake "choose your OS" screen used to appear.

I then reinstalled the Mandrake disk, booted to Mandrake and removed all the Linux options from the boot tool, leaving only Windows. Now I've made it worse because Windows still won't boot without the Mandrake disk installed and I can't boot to linux to try to fix the problem because I've removed it form the boot list!

Any ideas? How do I stop my computer from looking to boot from that disk?

Many thanks,

Matt

[rcgreen]

It looks like your BIOS is booting the Mandrake hard drive
first, and it has the bootloader. Leave this disk installed
and the computer should (hopefully) still boot windows.

It might be good to go in to BIOS setup and see which disk is
primary master, which is slave etc. It used to be that BIOS
would only boot primary master, but some now allow other
options.

If you boot from a live cd, you could edit the GRUB configuration
and restore the dual boot capability, or you could reinstall linux,
taking care to install the bootloader on the primary master
hard drive, and set the BIOS to boot the primary master.

Only the slave can be removed, if you still want it to be able
to boot.

[beagle2]

When you installed Mandriva it would have given you the option to install the GRUB bootloader which then pointed to /boot/grub/menu.lst in the drive you removed. Without that file GRUB doesnt know what to do so crashes. Since youve now edited that file through a GUI of some sort you will have to boot up with your Mandriva disk and repair the installation (with original hard drives installed).
Assuming you still want to copy stuff onto the new drive a rough and ready solution would be to use your xp disk and boot into rescue console and do fixmbr. This removes GRUB and you will be able to boot into windows only, then you can swap drives about before re-installing GRUB via Mandriva repair.
Probably an easier method but thats all I can think of.

[matthewbarr]

Thanks rcgreen and beagle2 - I'll take a look at what you suggest and report back.

Cheers,

Matt

[matthewbarr]

Thanks guys - should have remembered the fixmbr option form my Windows admin days - worked a treat.

Thanks again for your help,

Matt