On Sun, Dec 02, 2018 at 10:19:47PM -0000, Colin Davis wrote:
My system recently got its knickers in a twist so i decided to format the hard drive and start again, something i have done in the past. What is did not even think about at the time was that i would lose contact with my Linux partition. The system was dual booted via GRUB so i could either go into Windows or Linux. Now i can only get into windows which is not what i want. How can i format all of my hard drive and repartition the drive to enable me to reinstall Linux.
Yes, windows helpfully rebuilds your MBR (where GRUB lives) when you install it. This is on the basis that surely nobody would dare to run anything besides Microsoft Windows on their workstation, would they? Afterall, the hardware's Microsoft's, isn't it? But I'm not bitter...
Assuming that you only killed your windows partition, rather than your Linux one, you'll be needing to find a way to emergency boot your linux partition so that you can re-run your boot loader's boot block installer, and all should be back to normal.
How to do this depends on your distro to a certain extent. Hopefully, it either:
* Prompted you to create a boot disk; * provides a rescue facility on the installation CD.
Assuming you have one of these, stick it in the relevent drive, and boot your system back up. Once it's up, you need to get GRUB to reinstall its boot block. Sadly, I've always used LILO, so I can't help there, but I dare say someone else on the list can.
Hope that helps,
P.