Mandrake 8.0beta, Win2k, GRUB booting problem

[Chatterjee]

Here's the problem:

I installed windows 2000 on a harddrive and a couple of months later (now) Mandrake 8.0 beta on another.

Mandrake 8.0 takes over the mbr and loads GRUB now which does not see thw windows 2000 partition to boot from (i. e. it doesn't give me a choice to boot into windows)

I know I haven't blown the windows 2000 HD away because it's on a seperate disk but I don't know how to get back into windows 2000. Do I have to erase the MBR and load something into it? I'm kind of confused as to what I should do to make it a true dual boot system (I guess, with GRUB)

I guess the goal is to first retrieve the windows HD and then start investigating other boot managers if necessary. Help, please?

Thanks in advance!

-S

[Tyr-7BE]

Try to find a GRUB configuration file somewhere. It should probably be somewhere under /etc, possibly /etc/something. Might be something along the lines of grub.conf Take a look at it and see whether or not Win 2k is even listed in it. If it isn't, post the file here and we'll try to figure out what you should add to get it working.

[Chatterjee]

Well,

I found a workaround this problem from a poster at the ArsTechnica forums. So I'm posting my experience right here. I booted to the win2k recovery console with a win2k boot disk and then ran "fixmbr" which makes windows 2000 the default boot partition. So I guess, NOW I can play around with different bootloaders since there is a way to get back to windows 2000.

I'm hoping to make a complete switch to linux soon.

-S

[Tyr-7BE]

hehehe...kinda funny how they call it "fixmbr". Because since it doesn't have 2K on it, it's clearly broken!