Slightly OT: Restoring capability to boot.

[Dmitri Bachtin]

On Sun, 2009-01-11 at 17:51 -0200, Sergio Belkin wrote:
> [...]
> Can I restore that partition from Linux using some tool like dd? I'd
> lke to boot again on Windows 2003. I don't understand why windows is
> needing that partition... or better how to restore grub? and will be
> grub capable to load Windows 2003 too?
> 
> Thanks in advance!!!
> 

To restore your /boot simply restore all data from your data to the
target partition. In case the partition number changed, you will have to
fix it in your /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab.

Grub requires some information about your hardware before installing.
This is done by mounting /proc to chroot's proc and /dev ot chroot's
dev/ and additionally putting mounts infomration to /etc/mtab.

Gentoo handbook has excellent information about this.

Basically the steps:

assuming /boot is on sda1, / on sda2
# boot live system
mkdir /mnt/sys
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/sys
cd /mnt/sys
mount /dev/sda1 boot/
mount -t proc none proc/ # proc information for your chroot
mount -o bind /dev dev/ # mount device info (grub fails here)
chroot . /bin/bash
grep -v rootfs /proc/mounts > /etc/mtab #i believe it is optional
grub-install /dev/sda
exit
#umount here and reboot 

These commands come out of the head and there might be a few errors, but
to give you the idea ;)

Good luck
 -- Dmitri Bachtin