Semi urgent (and possibly stupid problem)

[Craig White]

On Mon, 2008-10-13 at 14:39 -0400, Mark Haney wrote:
> I've got one system here that is an older HP model.  Now, I dual boot 
> between XP and Fedora 9, but I do it rather differently.  Because of the 
> 'recovery' features built into the HP box, any MBR change is 
> automatically 'fixed' the next reboot.  So, instead of trying to get 
> grub to play nice with the XP boot loader, I've simply skipped that and 
> used a CD-RW boot disc, that I update whenever new kernels are released.
> 
> (Don't beat me to the good part...)
> 
> Well, I had just created a new bootdisk using the latest kernel, but 
> before burning it to CD my daughter boots to Windows to play Call of 
> Duty 4.  Which, isn't a bad thing.
> 
> The /bad/ thing is that my current bootdisk must have been damaged 
> somehow because on a reboot with it, it loads vmlinuz then hangs on 
> loading initrd.img.
> 
> Which leaves me in the lurch as I cannot find my older backup boot CD. 
> (I know I know, but I'm in the middle of moving everything into an extra 
> 1000sq ft I added onto my house for a library.
> 
> So, anyone got any real quick and easy ways to fix this?  I'd really 
> like to just boot a rescue CD (or something) and get to the new boot ISo 
> and burn it from another system.  However, any options will do.
----
it's rather trivial to modify the Windows C:\boot.ini to give a boot
option to boot your Linux instead of Windows and that way, leave the mbr
intact and not have to deal with any CD boot disk at all.

Google 'Windows boot.ini Linux' and you will find many suggestions on
how to do it.

Craig