Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Linux to the rescue

Yesterday, I wrote that Windows killed my laptop. A few updates, and my laptop wouldn't boot anymore - not to Windows, not to Linux, nothing.

Fortunately, I have a USB flash drive with Fedora 15 beta, so I was able to boot from that and get back to work.

A few of you suggested that one of the Windows updates had messed up the boot sector. I thought that sounded a likely culprit. A little googling, and I quickly found several suggestions to restore the Linux "GRUB" boot selector.

So, now my laptop boots again! That's Linux to the rescue.


  1. There's an article floating around on the Interwebz about how "Windows 7 has declared war on GRUB" (or something like that). It details problems similar to, and in some instances even worse than, yours.
    a Linux Mint user since 2009 May 1

  2. Here's the link:

    Windows 7 Declares War on GRUB, posted 6 May, 2011 by ZDNet UK.

    You are not alone.

  3. Good to hear it's working again. I was going to suggest MSWin screwed the MBR but I shut down my computer without realizing I didn't complete the post.

    In one instance (about 4 years ago) WinXP was putting up such a fight that I set up grub to run from the partition record instead and booted grub via ntldr.

