[TriLUG] dual boot laptop loosing boot info

[Robert Dale]

Why not virtualize windows?

Robert Dale
On Dec 7, 2010 9:57 PM, "Joseph Mack NA3T" <jmack at wm7d.net> wrote:
> I've got a new (for me) laptop, a Thinkpad X60.
>
> It's dual booting linux slackware 13.1/winxp with grub 0.92.
>
> Every half dozen or so reboots, instead of getting the
> grub boot menu, grub comes up with
>
> GRUB
>
> and nothing else. AFAIK this is not one of the listed grub
> messages, so I don't know what this means. I can boot to
> linux off a cdrom or usb stick and when I'm in linux, I can
> run
>
> grub-install /dev/sda
>
> and the machine boots another couple of times before giving
> me the same problem. This was on a new hard disk that was OK
> with badblocks and smartctl. I replaced the disk and get the
> same problem.
>
> I only boot to windows when someone needs windows help,
> which is about once a month or so.
>
> When I check windows after having been through a few cycles
> of running grub-install, I find winxp won't boot from a
> functioning grub anymore. Whether it stopped booting the
> first grub failure, I don't know.
>
> One time, wxp after chainloading, just did nothing (no disk
> activity, nothing), but I could still mount the files just
> fine with ntfs-3g
>
> Another time, the NTFS file system was shot and couldn't be
> mounted (and it wouldn't boot either).
>
> I assume the boot sector is being over written, but I can't
> imagine what would be doing that. Once time the NTFS file
> system was trashed as well
>
> I'm not getting any hardware problems (no freezes, hangs, no
> dirty ext3 filesystems on reboot), so it doesn't seem likely
> to be hardware.
>
> I've got everything backed up, so I just dd the copy back on
> the disk and I'm going again, but this is a pain.
>
> Any ideas where to look?
>
> Thanks Joe
>
> --
> Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
> jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
> generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
> Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!
> --
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