I had to reinstall windows, and now my optional boot sequence is gone. My Kubuntu is on a separate hd, NOT on a separate partition.

I know that I basically have to go into terminal w/a Live CD boot, I just don't know what to change. Yes, I know. I am a n00b, I only used ubuntu for 6mos. Any help is greatly appreciated.

what you need to do is to restore the boot manager (in this case grub), not the BIOS.
a very simple way to do it is to use Super Grub Disk; simply boot off the Super Grub CD and follow these instructions

szarmadzag wrote:I know that I basically have to go into terminal w/a Live CD boot, I just don't know what to change. Yes, I know. I am a n00b, I only used ubuntu for 6mos. Any help is greatly appreciated.

It's possible only the boot priority is messed up because I didn't think even windows overwrote the boot sector of every drive on the system. It may be worth looking in BIOS to see if the computer is trying the windows drive before your linux one. (If you can't tell there, disconnecting the windows drive physically and trying to boot would be a quick test -- if linux boots your problem is the priority).

However, if windows has overwritten the boot sector the basic safe procedure is
1. Boot livecd
2. Mount your linux drive (I'll assume it's /dev/hdc1 from here and mounted to /mnt/hdc1).
3. Setup a chroot environment: execute "mount -o bind /dev /mnt/hdc1/dev" and "mount -o bind /proc /mnt/hdc1/proc". This is so that support files are where they're expected for the next step.
4. Execute "chroot /mnt/hdc1 /bin/bash" to get into a reasonably native system.
5. Execute "grub-install /dev/hdc" to restore the boot sector and so on.
6. Reboot and hope.

I haven't had the need for this for a long time, but I seem to recall that some distro (RedHat, SuSE?) allowed you to type 'linux rescue' at the boot prompt, which would present the user with a menu where one of the options was 'Restore boot sector' (or similar).
Isn't this used anymore (or have other distros not adopted this)?

Since you say you're a n00b (no need to be ashamed: we were all n00bs one day):

- boot with a install or live cd in the drive
- when/if it says 'boot:', don't hit Enter, but type 'linux rescue' (no quotes) and then hit Enter
- see what happens; may work, may not

Rob

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