problems starting up

[laotzu]

I have a windows 98/mandrake linux dual boot so I had the GRUB. I rebooted the system today and instead of the little grub operating system chooser I receive..

[Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For the first word, TAB lists....]
grub>

And I can't do anything from there. There are various options from there, most of what I don't know anything about, one of the options was 'quit' but that just said 'unrecognized command'. Trying 'install' it said 'Error: Partition table invalid or corrupt'. So I tried starting up from my windows start-up disk but couldn't figure out what to do. Ideally I think I'd like to uninstall this version of linux if anyone knows if thats possible from my current position (that is if anyone understands how I'm trying state my position). But anyways I'm totally lost and a wee bit worried, if anyone can offer any help I'd be very appreciative.

Thank you very much,
laotzu the incapacitated

[cyan]

Well, if you have a win98 boot disk, put it in and type fdisk /mbr. That will reset the boot record to boot windows when the computer starts. (make sure you have a boot disk for linux) From there, you can re-install grub (actually, from what i hear, lilo is better) to the mbr. That used to happen to me when MS ran scandisk and/or defrag (never found out which one) Good luck.

<edit>one day I will learn how to spell</edit>

[This message has been edited by cyan (edited 17 January 2001).]

[laotzu]

ah, thank you very much..
it must have been scandisk because I had just ran that before rebooting.

thanks again,
laotzu