Grubbed

[Kevin J. Cummings]

Max B. Sawicky wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> I recently added a hard disk.  It can with an
> ATA card that I hooked it up to, configured on
> cable select.  WinXP is on the first HD (master),
> plugged into the motherboard.

What was the disk device name?  Your WinXP disk was probably /dev/hda. 
What was your new drive called?

> Then I installed Fedora on the new drive.  Later
> I found out the ATA card gave me no advantage and
> prolonged the boot up, so I yanked it, set the
> new HD as slave, and used the MB IDE port for
> both HDs.

Now you are changing the device name of your new hard drive.  You have 
probably changed it from whatever it was to /dev/hdb.  You will need to 
change all of your Linux references to your HDD in your grub.conf file 
to reflect this change.

> Then I rebooted and instead of Linux or Win XP,
> I get:
> 
> grub >

Yes, grub can no lionger find your "old" controller with the HDD on it. 
  You need to tell grub where your new drive is again.  The good news is 
that after you edit your grub.conf file, everything should work again. 
No need to reinstall grub or anything else (assuming that grub was 
installed in the MBR of your first hdd.

> along with a bunch of commands that didn't
> seem to do anything.  I used fdisk/mbr to
> wipe the MBR on the first drive and now grub
> is dead and I can boot to Win XP.  I don't
> know how to get back to the Linux install.
> Can I fix this without reinstalling Linux?

Ow, ouch!  Now you really screwed things up!  (not really!)
Go and get your rescue CD, boot from it, and use its utilities to 
re-install grub (this time with the correct disk references for your 
Linux boot and root info) into the MBR.  Running FDISK restored the 
WinXP boot stuff.

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at rcn.com
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us