"SuperBIOS" keeps overwriting grub (was Making Fedora Boot CD)
Jim Cornette
fc-cornette at insight.rr.com
Wed Jan 3 00:30:20 UTC 2007
Coy Scott wrote:
> I partitioned the hard drive of my Gateway GT5224 PC so that I could
> make it a dual boot system. It came with Windows XP. I installed
> Fedora Core 6. However, I can't boot Fedora.
>
> Whenever I installed GRUB on the master boot record (MBR) and then
> rebooted windows XP, the software detected "file corruption" and forced
> a reinstallation of Windows XP. This overwrote the MBR, removing GRUB
> and making it impossible to boot Fedora.
>
> So, I tried the only other installation option. I had the installation
> program install GRUB on first sector of the boot partition (/dev/sda6).
> However, when I reboot the computer, GRUB never gets to run because
> Windows XP is using the MBR.
>
> I've looked through a couple of books, and the GRUB documentation on the
> "gnu.org" website. But, I haven't found a solution.
>
> Can someone point me to documentation of how to make a boot CD? Can I
> put GRUB on a bootable CD that will allow me to boot Windows XP or
> Fedora Core 6? Do you have another suggestion? Thank you.
>
> In case it is helpful, here are the partitions that Fedora should be
> able to access:
>
> Mount Point: /boot
> Device: sda6
> Start: 24273
> End: 24285
> Size: 101 M
> Type: ext3
>
> Mount Point: /
> Device: LVLogVol00
> Start: ?
> End: ?
> Size: 28928 M
> Type: ext3
>
> Mount Point: /shared
> Device: sda5
> Start: 24535
> End: 26453
> Size 15053 M
> Type: vfat
>
> Coy Scott
>
>
It sounds like you have a BIOS that is supposed to detect problems with
the MBR and automagically fix the problem for you. You might try to go
into BIOS and disable that "feature".
I believe Mike mentioned a problem like this before and uses the
boot.ini approach to get grub to load from winNT.
As far as making a boot disk, you should read the help files available
on the net about how to make a CD to boot your system with. After you
get the commands for making a boot -iso with mkbootdisk you can boot
into rescue mode, chroot /mnt/sysimage followed by the needed options
needed to generate an iso file. I am guessing mkbootdisk kernelversion
-iso /tmp/boot.iso or similar commands would have to be performed to
create the image. Afterwards, you would need to burn the image to disk.
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