Boot (active) partition changing on me, ugh

ssampier

I have had good success with TE; everyone seems so nice and helpful. I have a technology problem I can't seem to find the answer to.

I dual boot Windows and Linux. Windows is XP x32 SP3 and Linux is Debian AMD64. I have 6 GB of RAM installed.

My partition structure is as follows:

/dev/sda1 NTFS (Windows)
/dev/sda2 Ext3 (Linux) flags--boot
/dev/sda3 FAT32 (shared space between Windows and Linux)
/dev/sda4 extended
/dev/sda5 linux-swap

Linux is bootable so I can use GRUB to decide whether to boot Windows or Linux. Everything in my GRUB menu works.

I usually use Linux during the day to use VirtualBox for my test network.

At night, when I want to relax and play games I use Windows.

I shut down Windows at night and when I start it up, the boot flag on sda2 is gone and move to sda1; Windows will only startup and I don't get my grub menu.

I use my G-Parted boot disc and mark the sda2 boot flag and it works again-- for one day, until I use Windows again.

This is frustrating! How can I stop Windows for mucking my partition flags?

tiersten

Put GRUB on the MBR.

ssampier

I don't remember doing this before. I followed some steps online to do this. I am somewhat confused what exactly is going on.

All my commands seemed to register and work. But Grub reports that it is installed on hd1,1. I do have a second drive, but it's just an IDE data drive.

When I tried to use root (hd0,1) it couldn't read the partition type. Hmmm, curious.

Relevant commands:
(all in Linux "rescue mode")

grub
find /boot/grub/stage1
root (hd1,1)
setup (hd0)
quit

It worked once, but now I seem to have the same problem.

Hmmmm

ssampier

I finally got this working.

I changed the second-to-last command from setup hd0 to setup (hd1) and it worked. Strange how it made my first Sata drive as the second drive.

My Grub menu.lst file requires root (hd0,0) and root (hd0,1), respectively.

Strange.

ssampier

Ugh. Grub is broken again. Error 22. All I did was update Linux and shut down.

ssampier

Reinstalled GRUB to MBR. Grub menu comes up, but won't boot either Windows or Linux. I checked my BIOS and my secondary IDE is the first boot drive. Ugh.

Fixed (for now).