I had the biggest scare of my whole computing experience today. Let me fill you in...
I have a dual boot of Vista and XP at the minute, and wanted to go one up and attempt a triple boot with ubuntu too. I have XP on RAID 0, and another drive for backups and now for the other two OS's. Because I needed a new partition for linux, and because my backup on the second drive was fairly old, I decided to delete everything off of it and create a new backup. So with Gparted I made a 20gig partition for linux (ubuntu to be specific). Rather than make the new backup of all my RAID stuff before I messed about with linux, I was eager to install it so didn't boot back into windows to backup my stuff.
So I got linux on there, with a nice 2GB swap partition too. I then let the PC reboot and tried to load into windows. It tried to boot into GRUB, but I got a error 21 and it wouldn't do anything else. So to fix it I grabbed my xp disk and fixed the MBR. There was some warning from the console that I had a non standard MBR and repairing it might render the drive unreadable, but like any good windows user I ignored the warning and told it to continue.
I then booted back up to be greeted with "disk error, or non system disk inserted, replace and hit any key to continue". Oh crap I thought. Cue me 20-30 mins of messing around with BIOS settings to try and get it to recognise a hard drive, or even the CD drive (to do a live CD boot) for that matter. I remember wondering why it wouldn't read from the CD at all too, but couldnt get anything to work. I pretty much though that I had lost ALL of my data (pics/files/music etc), that is a crushing feeling right there (and very very scary).
Turns out I'm a bit of a numpty.
I haven't properly used a floppy disk for ages (probably years), and I'd left the RAID driver floppy in the drive from booting into the windows repair CD. >_<
Needless to say, with that removed, and my BIOS restored to its proper state It booted back up fine. Wow, what a sense of elation!
I am now backing up all my RAID!
I'm going to make another thread about this, so if you know go find it, but what was causing the "error 21" in the GRUB loader?
Dan
