Technical Analysis: Recovering GRUB, Dual Boot Solutions

by jcannon on October 30, 2007 04:43pm

Today's post returns Port 25 to our more regular technical analysis that examine common technical scenarios when running Windows and Linux together, or Windows and other popular open source projects. This week, the lab looks at at disk recovery options using GRUB and dual boot scenarios.

Abstract:
Those of us who dual boot have seen it happen.  Somewhere down the line, we overwrite the bootloader (or configure it to ignore one of the operating systems) and suddenly we can only boot into one of the operating systems.  Probably the most common causes of these issues involve the use of fdisk /mbr and Windows installations overwriting GRUB  or LILO  (but it happens with Linux too).  In this paper, I will assume that you can only boot into Windows, and that you have decided to use GRUB as your bootloader.  A few of these notes are distribution-specific and those portions will be clearly marked.   However, most of the process will work on any Linux distribution which conforms to accepted standards.

Note: This paper represents testing and documentation in a lab environment. User Account Control (UAC) is an essential security component to Windows and Microsoft does not recommend turning off UAC in production environments.

Attachment: DualbootRecovery.pdf