Please help with dual booting (grub?)?

Question

A friend of mine gave me a laptop because he was trying to dual boot Ubuntu and Windows XP and now cannot load any OS. I'm not exactly sure what he's done, but the OS doesn't boot up at all. Instead I get a command line that looks like:

grub> _

I did some research on how to go about loading the kernel and booting an operating system, but I keep getting errors, namely:

Error 18: Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS

I did this to get that error:

grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
(hd0,0)

grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> kernel (hd0,0)/vmlinuz

I also tried to boot into the Windows OS by chainloading, which seems promising until it just goes directly back into the grub command line, as such:

grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> chainloader +1
grub> boot

Starting up...
GRUB loading stage2...

grub>

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I'm not a big Linux user and I don't have any experience dual booting operating systems, so any help or advice anyone can give on how to resolve this issue would be greatly appreciated!!

Answer 1

This should hep you reinstall grub and boot the computer to either OS>

Answer 2

Hello, I've been using ubuntu for a day. I'm entirely fresh to linux, but it's stolen my heart and I want to dual boot it with XP so I can use cubase/cs2 and play games.

I jumped through some hoops earlier and got the ATI drivers working.



My XP is installed on a SATA and ubuntu got an entire IDE for it's install. The SATA drive has never been first to start and doesn't detect on startup unless I change the boot order in BIOS.

I just want these two OSes to co-exist with separate harddrives. Ubuntu was installed second. I don't care which one starts first, I just want the choice to pick when it starts.



I read previous postings with a grub edit. I copied all of Buzz's code that didn't match my menu.lst and gave it a restart.

The grub menu worked, and windows was an option. However, when I picked it the screen showed the options:

Answer 3

check this out. step by step instruction is given



http://opensource-sidh.blogspot.com/2011/05/install-grub-rescue-recovery-in-ubuntu.html