Lost Grub - 2

[y199mp1505 at gmail.com]

Flavio,

Your first hard disk is PATA, your second hard disk is SATA.

And you are trying a dual boot with Windows XP on the first
partition of the first disk.

You seem to believe that Windows would boot from /dev/sdb.
That's impossible or you have provided incorrect details.

Forget it anyway, you will never succeed. I spent 20-30 hours
on this problem and the only solution is:

  - let Windows control the Master Boot Record (MBR) on /dev/sda
  - boot Ubuntu through Windows' boot.ini

Now this is a long story:

     -   restore the MBR to Windows (use the Windows console from the CD)

     -   re-install Ubuntu telling the installer
         to leave the MBR alone, it should install GRUB
         to /dev/sda6

     -   use the utility 'dd' to copy the GRUB boot record
         to a file as follows

             dd if=/dev/sda6 of=sda6.bin count=1 bs=512

     -   copy the file sda6.bin to c:\

     -   add the following line to boot.ini:
             c:\sda6.bin="Ubuntu 9.04"

If you are using a previous version of Ubuntu, the installer
may write to the MBR despite your instruction to the contrary.

On top of that, you will get better speed if you swap the drives
on the connectors so that the SATA disk is the first one and becomes
/dev/sda. This would imply a complete re-istall of both Windows and
Ubuntu. If you go for it, re-install Ubuntu then Windows so it takes 
over the MBR.

Good luck.


-- frank