Search Members Help

» Welcome Guest
[ Log In :: Register ]

Mini-ITX Boards Sale, Fanless BareBones Mini-ITX, Bootable 1G DSL USBs, 533MHz Fanless PC <-- SALE $200 each!
Get The Official Damn Small Linux Book. DSL Market , Great VPS hosting provided by Tektonic
Pages: (2) </ 1 [2] >/

[ Track this topic :: Email this topic :: Print this topic ]

 reply to topic new topic new poll
Topic: Boot USB CD from hard drive bootloader?< Next Oldest | Next Newest >
squidx Offline





Group: Members
Posts: 8
Joined: Mar. 2007
Posted: Mar. 30 2007,15:55 QUOTE
This may be interesting to you: I accidentally installed grub on my laptop (IBM T42/broken cd-r).

Now everytime I boot, I need to enter some grub code, because I cannot yet figure out where the menu.lst is and how to get at it from within Windows.

I'm trying to figure out how the grub landed on my hd0 instead of only on the USB flash, but I'm living proof you can do it.

Alex
Back to top
Profile PM 
arewhyainn Offline





Group: Members
Posts: 4
Joined: June 2006
Posted: April 01 2007,06:55 QUOTE
Quote (squidx @ Mar. 30 2007,10:55)
This may be interesting to you: I accidentally installed grub on my laptop (IBM T42/broken cd-r).

Now everytime I boot, I need to enter some grub code, because I cannot yet figure out where the menu.lst is and how to get at it from within Windows.

I'm trying to figure out how the grub landed on my hd0 instead of only on the USB flash, but I'm living proof you can do it.

Alex

there is a version of grub that can be install on a ntfs or fat http://www.geocities.com/lode_leroy/grubinstall/ . you don't need to edit your partition just your boot.ini file.
Back to top
Profile PM 
Juanito Offline





Group: Members
Posts: 1601
Joined: Sep. 2005
Posted: April 01 2007,10:23 QUOTE
I had a similar situation to this with an old desktop - you don't mention it, but can your BIOS boot from a USB stick?

If so, you can boot from the USB stick, shrink your NTFS partition with ntfsprogs, repartition/format the hd and make a hd install.
Back to top
Profile PM 
squidx Offline





Group: Members
Posts: 8
Joined: Mar. 2007
Posted: April 01 2007,19:37 QUOTE
Thanks for the suggestions -- I ultimately got the IBM rescue CD working on an old Mac CD-R that I frankensteined into a USB HDD. I then was able to reset my mbr in about 2 seconds, so now life is good - if the usb stick is in the drive when I boot, it starts up DSL, when it's not, I'm in my old XP.

My original comment was for miamicanes -- just to say that it *is* definitely possibile to install grub on windows without messing with partitions, because I did it -- inadvertently! (I recommend copying your boot.ini first, just for safety's sake)

Oh, and that grub version came from the DSL site someplace. If you need to know where, I could try to reconstruct my process.

Alex
Back to top
Profile PM 
8 replies since Mar. 05 2007,21:03 < Next Oldest | Next Newest >

[ Track this topic :: Email this topic :: Print this topic ]

Pages: (2) </ 1 [2] >/ 		reply to topic new topic new poll
Quick Reply: Boot USB CD from hard drive bootloader?

Do you wish to enable your signature for this post?
Do you wish to enable emoticons for this post?
Track this topic
View All Emoticons
View iB Code