How to fix or remove Grub at Boot?

Question

I have a Dell Inspiron E1705, that I'm running Windows XP Media Center on. I installed Fedora 7 on a External Hard Drive. The process went good, well I thought it did! But the problem occurs when I disconnect my External drive and then start my laptop up, I get a screen at boot that just say "Grub" in the upper left corner. Nothing else happens, it won't boot any father then that. Now if I restart my laptop with the external drive connected it will boot to a Fedora screen and then from there into windows. XP runs great after that point, but I don't want to have to lug around my External drive everywhere I go so I can get into XP. Is there a way of booting my laptop without running into that problem? I use my laptop for school and work, and I have a lot of important stuff on it. Which I would like to keep on it if possible.

I've been reading some of the postings in the forums and found perhaps two different ways of fixing a similar problem. One is to use "Fixmbr" and the other is to change the "Grub Loader." I'm not sure which one to do in my case! :smileysad: When I got my laptop I got "Dell XP Media Center Version 2005, reinstallation DVD" and the "Drivers and Utilities Disk." My laptop will get into the Drivers and Utilities disk, but it will not load up the reinstallation DVD. It goes back to the "Grub Screen." I'm not sure where to go from here. My overall plan was to install Fedora on the External drive and to plug the drive in whenever I want to do work in Fedora. Well I guess that didn't workout the way I planned it.

I hope that someone would be able to help me out with this. Cause this getting so really frustrating having to log into XP like this. I appreciate all the help I can get. :smileyindifferent:

jayfitzpatrick · Answer

Hey up..

this looks as if the MBR on your internal HDD was overwritten by the Grub boot loader, which in turn is pointing to the partition on your external HDD (most likely called /boot) and once your external HDD is removed you have no access to the boot partition containing the grub.conf file which in turn points to your XP install.

Now it has been a while since I have had to do this so please be careful and backup everything!!

you are right with the 2 options for fixing, the MBR for windows is probably your best bet, but 1st you will have to right a new MBR to your external HDD to allow you to continue to use Linux (the XP boot loader will not allow you to add Linux as a boot option)

Boot into Linux and run the following command:

grub-install /dev/hdXX *where XX is your hard disk and partition info*

update-grub *scans ads and configures all kernel boot parameters*

This should write a MBR to your USB HDD, test this by choosing the USB device from the F12 Menu at boot.

once you are happy with this you will have to fix your XP install

Disconnect your USB HDD and boot any XP CD, allow it to go through as though you are going to install windows and you will see that you have the option of going into the recovery console, this will dump you into a DOS screen, from there you will be able to do a fixmbr which should restore a XP based MBR,

Jay

Linux General

How to fix or remove Grub at Boot?

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