Re: Antw: HELP! GRUB wiped out my first hard drive's partition table!

[Jochen Hoenicke]

On Oct 30, Harmon S. Nine wrote:
> Nothing seems to help.  I do have an old machine.  Would an old or buggy
> BIOS be at fault?  Actually, now that I think of it, I installed a large
> hard drive on this machine some time ago, and installed an EZ-bios along
> with it so that win95 could see the whole hard disk.  This was (long)
> before grub was installed.  Could this be the problem?

Yes, that explains it: EZ-BIOS made a partition of type 0x55 spanning
all your harddisk and put the real partition table in the second
sector.  When you installed grub you removed EZ-BIOS, and wiped out
the real partition table in the second sector, but the ez-bios
partition in the first sector is still present. Linux sees it (watch
for the string "[EZD]" in your boot messages) and then remaps your
harddisk.  Your repartitioning only affected the second sector and
destroyed grub's stage1_5 embedded there.

If you still need EZ-BIOS, you have to install it again.  Then boot
grub via EZ-BIOS (I think you have to press CTRL on the EZ-BIOS
prompt, wait until the EZ-BIOS screen pops up, insert GRUB disk and
press A).  Alternatively you can run grub under linux.  You must
not use grub's command "setup", but use

install (hd2,0)/boot/grub/stage1 d (hd0) (hd2,0)/boot/grub/stage2 
(hd2,0)/boot/grub/menu.lst

If you want to get rid of EZ-BIOS, you have to destroy its partition
table entry.  Since linux doesn't allow accessing the real MBR, you
have to use grub for this: The command "geometry (hd0)" should show a
single unknown partition of type 0x55; this is the EZ-BIOS partition.
Replace it with the command "parttype (hd0,0) 0" (parttype was added
to grub recently).  If you then boot linux it shouldn't print "[EZD]"
anymore and you can access your real MBR and can recreate your MS-DOS
partition with fdisk.  Afterwards you can install lilo or grub again.

  Jochen