Re: Recovering from GRUB effects of "garbled" install

[Chris Murphy]

On Mar 16, 2012, at 9:31 AM, Richard Owlett wrote:

> Questions:
> 1. Can I get rid of GRUB completely from my hard drive?

It's easier to get rid of just the critical portion, and leave the rest alone 
for something else to over write (or if not over written it will be ignored). 
That's the boot code in the MBR. You can remove it by booting from a LiveCD, or 
even your linux installation, and as root doing:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=440 count=1

If you accidentally hit return before you type the last 1, but after you've 
designated the target disk, it will start zeroing your drive data and you're 
not going to get it back. So this command zeros a single block defined as 440 
bytes. The first 440 bytes of the disk (NOT partition, so this should be sda 
sdb sdc, make sure you have the right target) contains boot code.

Next you'll need to find replacement boot code for WindowsXP. And I'm not much 
help with that. The Windows rescue or repair might do it if you boot off your 
install CD, although it's possible it fixes things other than the boot code in 
the MBR.

Chris Murphy