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

[Harmon S. Nine]

I'll try this out.  Thank you very much. :)

-- Harmon

On Tue, 31 Oct 2000, Jochen Hoenicke wrote:

> 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
>