chartoo presents...

First grandchild

I am proud to present the first picture my first grand child,
Bella, pronounced Bey La

Get some Grub

No, it's not the kind you eat, it's a boot loading program so that you can boot more than one OS (operating system) ie WinXP, Linux, FreeBSD etc.

Now you ask, why do I need Grub?
Well, truth be known I wiped out the MBR (master boot record) on my primary hard drive. That's a special area on your hard drive where your computer, BIOS, looks to find what OSs you have on your PC to boot up.

I got cute and tried changing my bootloader without reading the instructions and absolutely trashed my MBR.
Fortunately I figured out how to restore, fix the MBR, WinXP boot loader using the XP installation disk in Recovery mode. In DOS I first ran the program FIXMBR but I got a warning that running this program might cause my FAT (file allocation tables) to become degraded which would destroy all my files, not what you want.
So thinking for a minute or two I remembered that there is another program that will check the files on your hard drive called CHKDSK. I ran CHKDSK, a minute or two later I got a report that said the file system on my hard drive was in good shape and that CHKDSK had fixed a couple of errors after which I ran FIXMBR.

I held my breath and rebooted hoping to see the WinXP log-in splash screen...
Yup, it worked, now I want to install Grub? properly so I can access the Fedora(RedHat Linux) installation on my secondary hard drive that I wrote about in the previous post.

For those who are interested there's a great Grub tutorial on IBM's web site, free, registration required.

;-)