GRUB ERROR

[James Wilkinson]

Barry Martz wrote:
> Boy, am I lost now.  I am  totally new to Linux.  I am using one
> computer with TWO hard drives.  One hard drive has Windows 2000 and
> the other Ubuntu.  It dual boots with a choice of 2000 and Ubuntu.  I
> was using 2000 and rebooted and it came up with:
> 
> Grub Loading 1.5.
> 
> Grub loading, Please wait....
> Error 25
> 
> Then it stalls
> 
> What is my next move?
> 
> The HDD with Ubuntu may have gone bad.  How do I save the HDD with
> windows 2000?  How do I check the drives?  

Tht sounds plausible, unfortunately.
> 
> I booted with a windows 98 disk and don't see anything on the drive.
> it is formated NTFS.

Do you plan to replace that drive? If so, if I were you, I'd disconnect
both of them, load Windows 2000 onto the replacement drive, reconnect
your old Win2K drive, and save the data. That way, you're least likely
to lose data (which I assume is what you're mostly worried about).

After that, I'd use a Ubuntu Live CD to see if I could retrieve anything
from the dying Ubuntu disk.

Does your Windows 2000 disk appear to the BIOS before the Ubuntu one?
(That would mean that your Windows drive was something like hda, and
your Ubuntu one something like hdc). Do you have grub's boot-sector on
hda? (This all sounds plausible: it's much the same way that I've got my
computer set up).

As IF your Windows 2000 disk is the "first", and IF it was installed
before Ubuntu and kept working once you installed it, then you can use
that handy win98 disk, boot up, and do 
fdisk /mbr
That will replace the grub boot sector with a standard MS boot sector.
When you boot, it will proceed to load the Windows 2000 boot loader from
the Win2K partition, and then Windows 2000 should load as normal.

Hope this helps,

James.

-- 
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