Re: bootable cd

[Anders Breindahl <skrewz@skrewz.dk>]

On 2006-01-03  1710, Alessandro Speranza wrote:
> Hi guys.
> I've been wondering lately, about bootable cds. The problem I have is the 
> following.
> Recently I had to reinstall windows on my dual boot machine. 
> Unfortunately, as you may know, when you reinstall windows, it 
> automatically deletes grub from the MBR thus I was not able to boot debian 
> any longer. Moral, I had to reinstall debian as well.
> 
> I order to avoid that, I found this interesting reading:
> http://www.kuht.it/modules/sections/index.php?op=viewarticle&artid=147
> about making a rescue grub-floppy (be careful, it's in Italian). However, 
> my laptop has no working (in the sense that it doesn't work any more) 
> floppy drive. It has a working cdrom drive though, so I was wondering:
> Is there any chance I can make a sort of rescue grup-cdrom? And if yes, 
> how do I do that?

As another poster already pointed out, any live-cd will do the trick.
Further, it might be worth mentioning the procedure after doing that:

- Boot the live-cd and make sure the /-partition is mounted.  In Knoppix,
  that won't be a problem, as it is done automagically. Also ensure that
  you have access to /boot, if that's on a seperate partition.
- As root, use the command chroot to chroot yourself into your old
  /-partition:
  chroot /mnt/oldslash /bin/bash
  Now you more or less have the environment of your Debian-installation.
- Assuming the hardware configuration hasn't changed, you should be ably
  to run update-grub to reinstall into your MBR:
  /sbin/update-grub

That's the theoretical approach. However, I haven't actually performed
this myself, so the actual procedure might differ a bit. In particular,
update-grub could be confused about where to find /boot -- in which case
it might be solved with a symlink.

Regards, Anders Breindahl.