Grub Loading Stage 2? PC Boot question

Factual Questions
1

I just FDISK’d and reformated my hard drive. I had RedHat Linux installed, but decided to go back to Win 2K. After I reformated with the /S option, I should be able to boot directly to the hard drive. However, what’s happening is my machine starts booting, seemingly normal diagnostic info comes up about my devices, then a message displays at the bottom real quick that says “Grub Loading Stage 2”, and the machine procedes to reboot. It will cycle like this forever, if I’d let it.

Here are my questions:

  1. I thought the Grub boot loader was a Linux thing only. Is this correct?
  2. If it is correct, then evidently formatting my hard disk wasn’t enough. Is this where I would do a ‘Low Level’ format?
  3. If I need to do a low level format… how do I do this?
  4. Could this be some bios setting?
  5. Any advice in addition to this is most welcome.

FYI, PII, MMX 350mhz, 196mb ram

E3

2

This is the only one I can confidently answer.

Yes! Grub is a RedHat boot-loader, that was introduced recently (7.2?).

On the other questions I can only guess. I would believe that the GRUB loader is on the ‘master boot record (MBR)’, which will not be deleted by formatting any of the normal partitions. (See it as a separate partition if you like).

What I would try to do, is to boot on a win2k CD, and try to let windows overwrite the MBR.

I know that this isn’t much help, but at least it’s a bump…

3

In particular, if you’ve got DOS rescue disk (you’ve got a DOS rescue disk, right? If not, snag a copy of someone else’s), the proper thing to do is to run FDISK /MBR . This’ll only work with DOS FDISK, though, not with The equivalent Linux program that’s also called FDISK.

4

Grub seems to reside on the MBR (master boot record) and MS-DOS’s format does not clear out that area.

5

  1. Boot from your Windows 2000 CD.

  2. Choose to repair an installation, and use the Recovery Console.

  3. Once you’re logged into your account (in text mode), type FIXMBR to write a new master boot record.

  4. Reboot. There’s no need for low-level formats, BIOS tweaks, or virgin sacrifice.

See also this Microsoft documentation page.

6

On further review, I see you’ve already formatted. That makes things a little different. :slight_smile:

I’m assuming you just want one big partition for Windows.

If you’re just installing Windows 2000, go ahead and boot from the CD like I said, and just run through the install. You’ll want to delete the partitions that Red Hat created when Windows asks you on which drive you want to install… wipe them all out. Then create a new partition that spans the drive, and install to that.

Windows will write a new MBR, so you don’t need to remove GRUB by hand.

7

I don’t have a boot disk for Win2K. I have to upgrade to Win2K from Win98. I’m using a Win98 boot floppy that I created years ago.

I originally deleted all old partitions, and set up one primary DOS partition before I formatted the hard drive.

I haven’t tried to boot from my my Win98 CD.

E3