Big Grub Problems.

[Keinlicht07]

Ok, i'll start by apologizing in advance for the wall of text i am about to create. The other day, i decided to put sl 5.0 on my system, and proceeded to delete a previous install from my harddisk (using windows disk manager >.<), i deleted the linux partition and the boot partition (i know, terrible idea) and rebooted. that's when i ran into the first problem. GRUB loaded up into it's command-line form (which i'd never seen before, and scared me half to death), after some looking around the internet on my ipod, i discovered the correct lines of code to boot windows, (using chainloader) and booted up fine. however, i couldnt use the graphical loader, and tried some other stuff (setup (hd0,1)) which seemed to work (reported "successful") and i rebooted again. this time though, i got something saying only:

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Loading GRUB stage1.5
_

and it stayed there with the underscore flashing, and never loaded up. needless to say, i can't load into any OS of the harddisk, so i used the sabayon livecd. The GRUB editor in the livecd provides an "install/restore GRUB" option, but i keep getting an error saying:

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grub-install returned with unknown exit code 1. an error may have occured

I think maybe this is because the installer isn't recognizing the hard drive, since the suggestions list only the partitions of the live cd.

In any case, I also discovered that i don't have any "menu.lst" file ( a box opens when i enter the grub editor alerting me to that), which would explain the lack of a graphical interface to GRUB, and that i can access the grub command line through the "grub" command in the livecd bash.

Summarily, i need to know whether or not there is any way to either: Install, Get, Create, or Find a menu.lst file and otherwise fix or re-install grub; or boot into windows and use a "Fixmbr" command to overwrite the grub files (re-installing them at another time), and/or rid the hard drive of GRUB entirely.

Thanks for taking the time to help a noob who's basically bricked his system

[wolfden]

We don't use menu.lst, it's just a sym link to grub.conf, you can just recreate the sym link if you need too.
ln -s <destination> <linkname>

Have you tried the Super Grub Disk? It's a must have tool to help with grub problems. http://www.supergrubdisk.org/ Download it, burn it to disk, boot with it and you can reinstall grub or boot operating systems. Also http://www.sorgonet.com/linux/grubrestore/ has a really nice easy way to reinstall grub.

[wolfden]

if you don't have another pc to burn the grub disk, you can use the Sabayon Live disk and than chroot into your system to do the grub commands in the restore grub howto

to chroot in

# mkdir -p /mnt/sabayon

change the /dev/sdb7 to where your sabayon install is of course

# mount /dev/sdb7 /mnt/sabayon
# mount -t proc none /mnt/sabayon/proc
# chroot /mnt/sabayon /bin/bash
# env-update
# source /etc/profile
# export PS1="(chroot) $PS1"

than follow the article I posted

[lestoil81]

If you have a windows boot disk you run command fdisk /mbr. I saved my win95 and winME boot/rescue floppy disks just for this problem.(I used Win2000Pro/XP) The windows install cd should also allow running the same command. Other Winboot disks are available via google. Windows should then boot directly. And you can then handle your SB5 install.
I don't use a boot partition. I just install grub to mbr and it includes windows and the other detected linux installs. The SB5 cd is great for re-installing/repairing grub to mbr. I've also tried SB5 grub to root partition and added SB to another linux' /boot/grub/menu.lst.
Good luck:)