Lost Dual Boot Screen

I'm having a Lost-Dual-Boot-Screen problem again. Last time I resolved
it by re-installing Ubuntu 9.04 on my Dell Dimension 8300 (Windows XP
SP 3) using a recent wubi download. Had gotten several responses to my
previous help call which hadn't helped. Later realized that they all
seemed to involve using the grub menu to restore the dual boot menu.
However, I never get near the grub menu when the dual boot screen is
missing. That is, after the first pre-bootstrap screen, the machine
goes right into Windows startup screens. Pressing F8 gives me the
usual choices, and the chance to choose (only) Windows to boot into.

Everything had worked fine after the wubi re-install, through several
reboots, and I even learned a few new things about Ubuntu and Linux.
However, for totally unrelated reasons, I had occasion to use a dandy
program called BootSafe which *may* have caused the problem. That is,
it fools around with system innards enuf to get you into Safe Mode
without requiring use of F8, and, once in Safe Mode, one uses the
program to return to a "normal" bootup. In any case, the next time I
rebooted, the dual boot screen had gone missing again.

TIA from a clueless newbie for any clues, or solution other than
another install!

At Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:07:40 -0700 (PDT) jr4939 <jr4939j DeleteThis @gmail.com> wrote:

>
> I'm having a Lost-Dual-Boot-Screen problem again. Last time I resolved
> it by re-installing Ubuntu 9.04 on my Dell Dimension 8300 (Windows XP
> SP 3) using a recent wubi download. Had gotten several responses to my
> previous help call which hadn't helped. Later realized that they all
> seemed to involve using the grub menu to restore the dual boot menu.
> However, I never get near the grub menu when the dual boot screen is
> missing. That is, after the first pre-bootstrap screen, the machine
> goes right into Windows startup screens. Pressing F8 gives me the
> usual choices, and the chance to choose (only) Windows to boot into.
>
> Everything had worked fine after the wubi re-install, through several
> reboots, and I even learned a few new things about Ubuntu and Linux.
> However, for totally unrelated reasons, I had occasion to use a dandy
> program called BootSafe which *may* have caused the problem. That is,
> it fools around with system innards enuf to get you into Safe Mode
> without requiring use of F8, and, once in Safe Mode, one uses the
> program to return to a "normal" bootup. In any case, the next time I
> rebooted, the dual boot screen had gone missing again.
>
> TIA from a clueless newbie for any clues, or solution other than
> another install!

All you need is a rescue disk. Your Ubuntu install disk *should* have
a 'rescue' mode. Boot up in rescue mode. I don't know about how
Ubuntu does this. For a RedHat flavored system, it will look for your
Linux installations and will mount the one you select and give you a
shell. You'd cdroot to that directory and then type 'grub-install
/dev/hda' (or maybe 'grub-install /dev/sda'), than ^D twice and then
remove the install disk, once the system goes down. You'll then have
the grub bootloader back. I *suspect* that the Ubuntu install disk in
rescue mode works simularly.

Obviously, the 'dandy program called BootSafe' clobered the MBR to a
vanila state. You probably DON'T want to do that again.

>
>
>
>

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