[TriLUG] dual boot laptop loosing boot info

Derek Linz chapelhilllaptopshop at gmail.com
Tue Dec 7 23:11:53 EST 2010


Joe,

I know I've run into that issue before, and I'm not 100% sure how I
resolved it, but my instinct is to say I upgraded to grub2 (1.98). Is
that an option for you?

-Derek Linz

Composed on a touch screen, please don't judge me.

On Dec 7, 2010, at 9:58 PM, Joseph Mack NA3T <jmack at wm7d.net> wrote:

> I've got a new (for me) laptop, a Thinkpad X60.
>
> It's dual booting linux slackware 13.1/winxp with grub 0.92.
>
> Every half dozen or so reboots, instead of getting the grub boot menu, grub comes up with
>
> GRUB
>
> and nothing else. AFAIK this is not one of the listed grub messages, so I don't know what this means. I can boot to linux off a cdrom or usb stick and when I'm in linux, I can run
>
> grub-install /dev/sda
>
> and the machine boots another couple of times before giving me the same problem. This was on a new hard disk that was OK with badblocks and smartctl. I replaced the disk and get the same problem.
>
> I only boot to windows when someone needs windows help, which is about once a month or so.
>
> When I check windows after having been through a few cycles of running grub-install, I find winxp won't boot from a functioning grub anymore. Whether it stopped booting the first grub failure, I don't know.
>
> One time, wxp after chainloading, just did nothing (no disk activity, nothing), but I could still mount the files just fine with ntfs-3g
>
> Another time, the NTFS file system was shot and couldn't be mounted (and it wouldn't boot either).
>
> I assume the boot sector is being over written, but I can't
> imagine what would be doing that. Once time the NTFS file system was trashed as well
>
> I'm not getting any hardware problems (no freezes, hangs, no dirty ext3 filesystems on reboot), so it doesn't seem likely to be hardware.
>
> I've got everything backed up, so I just dd the copy back on the disk and I'm going again, but this is a pain.
>
> Any ideas where to look?
>
> Thanks Joe
>
> --
> Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
> jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
> generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
> Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!
> --
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