On Tuesday 10 February 2009, Allen Weiner wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 20:14 -0500, Chris Knadle wrote:
> > On Tuesday 10 February 2009, Allen Weiner wrote:
> > > My desktop PC is a Dell. It is multiboot. It has Windows ME,
> > > Fedora 9, and Ubuntu 8.10. It has two HDDs. HDA contains
> > > Windows ME. GRUB is installed in the MBR of HDA. HDB contains
> > > Fedora and Ubuntu.
> > >
> > > I recently obtained possession of a Dell Windows XP
> > > installation CD. I'm trying to use this CD to replace Windows
> > > ME on HDA with Windows XP.
> > >
> > > The Windows XP installation procedure ran for 5-10 minutes and
> > > then restarted the PC (multiple PC restarts are a standard part
> > > of XP installation). At the time of restart, the XP installer
> > > indicated that the install would complete in 50 minutes. When
> > > the PC restarted, it displayed my standard GRUB menu rather
> > > than continuing the XP install. What do I need to do to have
> > > the Windows XP install run to completion?
> >
> > I think all you need to do is make another GRUB entry to
> > chainload to where you installed Windows XP. If you replaced
> > Windows ME with Windows XP, then the same exact GRUB entry should
> > be able to boot Windows XP now.
>
> Thanks for your reply.
>
> The install process was only 10% completed when it restarted the
> PC. It had not yet overwritten GRUB in the MBR. The solution turned
> out to be to select "Windows ME" from the GRUB menu.
Right -- which is now Windows XP, just with the wrong name in the GRUB
menu.
> Control
> returned to the XP installer at the point where it had left off.
> The install process continued for another 50 minutes. There were
> numerous PC restarts. But for all subsequent restarts, GRUB had
> been overwritten.
Windows only overwrites the initial stage_1 portion of GRUB, and only
does so if that portion is in the MBR. This specific situation is
why I sometimes like to install the bootable section of GRUB into
an "active" partition (i.e. set to be booted in fdisk) rather than
the MBR because it's easy to use fdisk to swich which partition is
active after reinstalling Windows, but there are some minor downsides
to doing this.
1) As some have mentioned, at boot time the BIOS still checks
the MBR first even when a partition is made "active" for
booting, so you have to know to overwrite the MBR with a
"standard" boot record the first time
2) The "standard" boot record available to overwrite the MBR
with is actually a legacy DOS boot record which is limited
and can only boot one of the first 4 partitions that has
been set active
In practice, 2) isn't really a problem because you can make a small
100 MB /boot partition at the head of the drive before installing
operating systems in order to get around this. Or another
alternative is using a boot loader that can be loaded entirely in the
MBR, like GAG (which is free and GPL), which is the method I'm
currently using. GAG is also on the "System Rescue CD", BTW.
> After the XP install, I used Knoppix to reinstall GRUB. I then
> rebooted into XP. At least for this first reboot, XP didn't mess
> with GRUB.
I believe there are two times Windows can mess with GRUB: at install
time, and when running the "Startup Repair" or "Recovery Console"
utility from the Windows CD to fix a broken NT boot loader.
-- Chris
--
Chris Knadle
[email protected]
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