GRUB Reinstall

[Thomas Kaiser]

> will kill the MBR and GRUB will be gone.
>      My question is: How easy is it to reinstall GRUB and get the
> settings that I had before?
You could backup your MBR first.
For the first IDE drive: dd if=/dev/hda of=/somewhere/mbr.bin bs=512 
count=1 would do the trick. (But, don't change the partition table)

After that install XP and XP will boot fine, but you cannot boot linux 
anymore. Now, you need a linux boot/recovery/live disc/cd and put your 
backup of the MBR back to the disk. dd if=/somewhere/mbr.bin of=/dev/hda 
can do this. But now, XP is not booting anymore :-) (maybe it will boot 
if you had alredy the right entries in menu.lst). If not you have to 
edit your /boot/grub/menu.lst. Add something like this:
# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/hda1
title          Windows NT/2000/XP
root           (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader    +1

But before you start to ply with this, make a grub boot floppy and test 
it before you do reinstall XP. I don't remember correctlly how to make a 
grub boot floppy, but google knows. If something goes wrong, you can 
boot from the floppy and point grub to your linux kernel to boot.

Regards, Thomas