[clue-tech] Help Recovering from grub-install error

[gthrelk at comcast.net]

> [...]
> > Can't really tell you where grub was originally.  I would have thought that 
> > /dev/hda and /dev/hda1 both pointed to the same area i.e. the beginning of 
> > first disk.  Looking at the results of your requested commands, I guess 
> > I've already learned something new since they show different results.  
> 
> If it were that easy it wouldn't be any fun, would it? ;-)
> 

Fun, this ain't :(

> [snip]
> You didn't say what happens when you try to boot Windows, but GRUB 
> probably expects hda1 to be Win95, not GRUB.  If you select Windows on 
> the menu do you just get the menu again?
> 

That's exactly how it behaves.

> [snip] 
> The page http://home.att.net/~rayknights/pc_boot/w98bboot.htm indicates 
> that a Win98se partition starts with 6 sectors of boot code followed by 
> a copy of that boot code.  We only care about the first sector (since 
> that should be the only one GRUB touched).  So let's copy sector 7 into 
> sector 1.  (I don't have Win98 to verify this.  We'll check it below.)
> In Linux, as root, first we want to put GRUB back where it belongs:
> grub-install /dev/hda
> 
> [snip]
> 
> Now let's get the boot sector we need:
> 
> dd if=/dev/hda1 of=hda1.boot bs=512 count=1 skip=6
> 
> Run hda1.boot through xxd and check that it's close to the hex dump on 
> the web page above.  (There should be a MSWIN4.1 at the beginning and 
> the IO SYS, MSDOS SYS, and WINBOOT SYS stuff should be at the end, as 
> well as the last 2 bytes being 55aa--in the hda1.txt you sent GRUB 
> didn't seem to overwrite those parts of the sector.)
> 
> If the hda1.boot you get isn't close, try skip=5 or skip=7.  Then put it 
> on the disk:
> 
> dd if=hda1.boot of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1
> 
> Now reboot and away you go--Windows should come up fine.
> [snip]

Installed grub at beginning of /dev/hda, verified the contents of sector 7 looked as described by the google article's described layout.  Upon reboot, I did get a little further with messages
"Booting Windows98se"
"rootnoverify (hd0,0)
"chainloader +1" 
but the boot then hangs.... I retried by copying count=3 rather than count=1 as the article suggested to me that the boot record occupied 3 sectors..... Same result on attempted boot.  However, I can now view some of the files via Windows startup disk but attempts to mass copy to a clean drive with utilities like xcopy or PartitionMagic result in "path errors".  Looks like I"ve still missed/messed something.  At least I can go after the files I MUST HAVE.

Thanks for all the help,

Gary