Friday, August 31, 2007

Repair GRUB booting with a USB stick and XP

When we're installing our machines for dual booting, sometimes we have to restore the previous MBR that the Windows installation has overwriten, as we have lost the GRUB booting. This method is working fine, and allows to restore the GRUB MBR flawlessly, creating the USB stick configuration from XP. We need:
Simply, install the HP USB Key Utility, insert the USB stick, execute the program with the option "Transfer floppy image to USB key", select the Super Grub Disk floppy image, and check that the selected USB drive is the right one. This will create a booting USB that will allow us to execute the Super Grub Disk.

To restore the MBR with GRUB, boot the computer with the USB in, and follow the steps:
  1. GNU/Linux
  2. Fix boot of GNU/Linux (GRUB)
  3. Choose the partition where GRUB is installed (usually /boot)
  4. SGD has suceeded
  5. Exit the menu tree and reboot, taking out the USB stick
This will make us boot GRUB again.

1 comment:

cheap computers said...

Surfing the web I found out that this is a problem of the buggy DSDT that Acer ships with their BIOS.