Help needed - I totally fried my grub...

[thaumielx72]

OK, here's the scenario....

I have been using a dual boot system from one 160 GB hard drive. I have three partitions. The first is hda1 with Windows XP. Then I have my Debian sarge loaded into hda2. I couldn't get past how easy it was to work with both systems using Knoppix so I created a third partition using qtparted and loaded a knoppix boot there. (I know, knoppix is supposed to be used from CD/DVD but the basic setup is sufficient for my needs and I have already scratched up 3 CD's and DVD's and had plenty of disk space so I figured why not?)

Loaded Knoppix into the third partition and it booted fine. The problem is that it no longer showed my Debian partition, just Knoppix and the XP boots. I read that there was a workaround for fixing the Debian mbr and from knoppix did the root console, start grub, root (hd0,1), setup (hd0), then reboot.

I'm a total Linux noob I know so you can imagine my surprise when I tried to reboot and all I get is a little smiley face at the bottom of the screen .

Well, at least I still have one working Knoppix CD left so any help here would be appreciated.

I'm going to keep scouring google for potential help. I will be checking back. Any ideas other than the obvious "Well, you pretty much screwed up so you might as well start from scratch" and I will be forever in your debt.

[tr]

Loaded Knoppix into the third partition and it booted fine. The problem is that it no longer showed my Debian partition, just Knoppix and the XP boots.

That's right - and a pity. Knoppix-installer adds Windows partitions automatically to the GRUB but not Linux partitions

But the situation is not very bad and is easy to fix. First you can add Debian to be booted from Knoppix's GRUB and then reboot to Debian and install Debian's GRUB if you prefer it.

If you don't know how Debian can be booted, just mount /dev/hda2 look how
/boot/grub/menu.lst looks and add Debian section to the corresponding Knoppix's Grub and save the file. Your Debian section looks like this:

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/hda2.
title           Debian (on /dev/hda2)
root            (hd0,1)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2
initrd          /boot/initrd.img
savedefault
boot

So you need an editor to do this all and the easiest one is Midnight Commander what you can start from the console sudo mc. You must have root priviledges to do changes to you menu.lst file.

-tapsa-