grub-install seems to be wiping my partitions

[akonstam at trinity.edu]

On Mon, Apr 04, 2005 at 05:13:50PM -0400, Duncan Lithgow wrote:
> Sounds strange to you too? It does to me, here\s what\s happening...
> 
> I recently installed win2000 at the front of my drive, knowing it
> would mess my boot loader (grub) but expecting I could fix it, I have
> before.
> 
> So I threw in FC3 disk one, got to the command line chrooted to
> /mnt/sysimage and ran grub/install hd0. Maybe that wasn\t a good idea
> after all...
> 
> On rebooting it seemed to work when I booted into windows so I thought
> I\d try fc3 and rebooted. Grub Error 22, something about can\t find
> stage1-5. So, I put FC3 Disk1 in again and ran that - this time it
> refuses to mount the old system saying "no linux partitions found" -
> my blood pressure rises...
> 
> I thought "that can\t be and threw in PartitionMagic - "partition
> Table error", So I tried Knoppix, it found two drives, one the win2000
> partition and the other and unmountable, unrecognised section. It
> should have found about 7.
> 
> So, I guessed that I\d somehow lost my partitions and went looking for
> a solution. Found TestDisk, got win2000 installed again - that being
> the only partition I could risk playing with. Ran TestDisk, great wee
> program, worked fine, found the 'deleted' partitions and restored them
> - windows could see the big fat32 partition with all my non-system
> files and things looked good. But then as I went through the process
> of getting grub working, same as above - it did the same thing again.
> 
> So now I\m using gmails web interface and Knoppix and hoping someonw
> knows what's going on - I'm going to bed.
> 
> Duncan
One thing to try is not to use grub-install which is flaky on some
systems and results in the error messages you report.

Instead type the commands:
grub
> root (hd0,0)
> setup (hd0)
> quit


=======================================================================
When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.
-------------------------------------------
Aaron Konstam
Computer Science
Trinity University
One Trinity Place.
San Antonio, TX 78212-7200

telephone: (210)-999-7484
email:akonstam at trinity.edu