GRUB Infestation

[Leon Goldstein]

A cautionary tale.

I have a scratch drive in my Core 2 Duo box to play with various SMP and 
64 bit OS's.
The setup is:
1st partition (primary): Solaris 10
2nd partition (primary): Win XP
3rd partition (primary): Debian
4th partition (logical): swap

I got a set of Debian 4 DVD's from Cheapbytes and installed it in the 
3rd partition over an earlier Debian.
Since I use Solaris' GRUB to boot everything, I selected (hd0,2) as the 
location to install GRUB for Debian 4.
The installer returned an error, and I remembered that grub-install 
often gags on (hdx,y) and prefers the /dev/hdx syntax.
So, you guessed it: I told the installer to put GRUB in /dev/hda2. 

That stopped Win XP from booting, and also from mounting, reporting an 
unrecognizable file format.
I could not repair the damage using the Win XP install media, so I wound 
up having to do a complete reinstall.

-- 
Leon A. Goldstein

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