I had my MBR rewritten when I reinstalled Windows XP . I have Linux Fedora Core2 installed . Now the problem is that I dont have the boot disk & since the MBR is rewritten I am not able to boot into linux.
Can anyone suggest me a solution.

CINMAS

Are you not able to boot a pre-installed system from the Fedora installation CD? Is there a "rescue" option or similar?

Failing that you may be able to boot from the installation CD and pass a root=/dev/hdXX at the boot prompt where hdXX is your root partition.

Still no joy? Then boot a live distro like knoppix or use a floppy like Tom's Root/Boot Disk (http://www.toms.net/rb/), mount your root partition to a temporary mount point, change your root to it and then reinstall lilo/grub, eg:

# mkdir /mnt/temp
# mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/temp
(assuming that /dev/hdb1 is your linux root partition)
# chroot /mnt/temp
# lilo
or
# grub-install /dev/hda
Now you can reboot.

Once you have it up and going again, make a boot disk for future use:
# mkbootdisk

3Dave,

Thank for your advice, anyway here I still have something need to reconfirm with you.

I try to boot from the Fedora installation CD, i enter 'linux rescue' at the boot prompt, after that system boot into sh-shell and print the following message:
"your system has been mounted under /mnt/sysimage"

then, at the
sh-2.05b#
i type 'chroot /mnt/sysimage' to mount to the root environment.

the question i would like to ask you is: can i reinstall lilo/grub using the following command in shell:

# mkdir /mnt/temp
# mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/temp
(assuming that /dev/hdb1 is your linux root partition)
# chroot /mnt/temp
# lilo
or
# grub-install /dev/hda

and, will this command install boot loader into MBR.

CINMAS

The steps I gave about "mkdir /mnt/temp" etc is similar to what has already been done when you do "linux rescue" only that your root partition has been mounted under /mnt/sysimage instead. Once you have done the "chroot /mnt/sysimage" then all you need to do is to run the lilo or grub-install command...I'm guessing that Fedora uses grub so try that one first.

hi guys..
i have a similar problem. I had windows xp sp2 and redhat linux 9.0. I had done some silly changes in the windows filesystem that next time i restarted windows.. it wudnt show me the OS options but wud directly go to grub> prompt. me being a linux newbie.. i had to finally reinstall windows XP> now after i did a windows xp reinstall..i m unable to get into linux. imean i don get the OS options.
well what i need to know is can i edit the boot.ini so that windows reads the linux partition also.
i have6 partitions with windows on C .

please help.

pps_krishnakant@yahoo.com

This may help:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+NT-Loader.html

Although you should be able to boot from the redhat installation CD and boot up linux with "linux rescue" at the boot prompt. From there you should be able to reinstall grub with "grub-install /dev/hda".

Hi 3Dave,

Thank for your information.

I am busy past few week, not yet try to recover my Linux system.
Plan to do this weekend.

Hope everything be OK.

CINMAS

Hi 3Dave,

Thank YOU.

Now my linux system has been recovered.

All running as before.

CINMAS

:)

Now don't forget to make that boot floppy in case you need it in the future.

Oh, and it is no good just creating it....actually try booting from the floppy too to make sure that it works. Chances are that the one time you need it you'll find that it doesn't work!!