GRUB/NT bootloader strangeness

[pr3hensile]

Hey all,

I'm encountering some strange problems with GRUB on my machine. I did have everything working fine as per the install docs (with the only slightly non-standard thing being that my first hard disc partition is Win 2000 rather than Gentoo, but that shouldn't matter), with GRUB chainloading to the NT bootloader on its respective partition.

However, one day, things go a bit funny (I suspect this is to do with installing some software on my Windows partition that uses C-Dilla protection, which apparentely writes to your MBR), and GRUB won't load stage 1.5 anymore.

Fine, I boot off of a boot disc (Zool in this case, because my CDROM drive has packed up so I'm forced to use floppies), re-install GRUB on the MBR. This time I get as far as the menu, but I can't go to Windows anymore, and if I try the commands associated with the menu choice by hand at the GRUB command prompt, I get all kinds of funky errors about my NT partition being an unknown type (when it's FAT), and having an "invalid number of cylinders".

OK, I think, as I'm using Windows more than Gentoo at the moment for fairly pressing college work, I'll just restore the NT MBR and forget about GRUB for the moment. However, having done this, I get an error saying "NTLDR not found," even though I've gone to an NT recovery console and done a "fixboot" on my NT partition as well as the "fixmbr" necessary to restore the drive's MBR.

So my question is this. Based on the errors I'm getting from GRUB, is my partition table buggered, which is why I'm getting all this strange behaviour? I would think not, because the machine still works fine in either OS if I boot off of a floppy. How then, can I fix this? At the moment, I'm booting off floppy all the time, which is inelegant as well as annoying. Worst case, could I not create an image of my NT boot floppy and configure GRUB to boot off of that somehow?

[seaweed]

You might want to check for a virus via some recent AV floppies. It does sound strange indeed.

Having removed grub and restored the windows bootloader "fdisk /mbr" you should be fine(for a windows load).

After checking for a virus. You might want to restore the windows bootloader again and setting the bios virus protection/mbr protection on.

If something is changing your mbr it should pop up an error.

[pr3hensile]

Yeah, it looked like it might be a virus to me, too, so I installed and ran a virus checker (the free one, H+BEDV AntiVir), but my system turns out to be clean. Shoulda mentioned that.