Thank you for your welcome mail, in fact since i joined i have been supprised by the activity. This being the first mailing list i have joined. Whilst not completely to new to computing i started playing around with the Acorn Electron ( perhaps a blast from the past). Then came a break for a few years. i started again in 1994 and have been using the dare i say it, the microsoft system. I had read a lot about Linux and started to get a hankering to try it out. My son who had recently installed Linux on his computer, The Mandrake 7.1 variation. Gave me a copy as a present.
Due to pressure of work i have not yet had time to get really into it although i have read and purchased a number of books on elementary Linux. I could not hack it in 24 Hours as the title of one book suggested. Here i am a newboy or not so new really, wishing to learn something about the system. Without pushing my luck on the length of correspondence allowed could one of you learned gentlemen help.
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.
Colin Davis
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.
Boy, doesn't time fly. It's nearly christmass again, and I've missed out on sixteen years <g>
Regards, Paul.
P.S. Offers of help have been made off list...
On Sunday 02 Dec 2018 10:19 pm, Colin Davis wrote:
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Colin Davis -
Paul -
Paul Russell