Tthe system has always been a MS configured system with an XP built MBR. All HDDs and I/O devices are IDE class.
Drive 1 - The main drive's MBR pointed to Partition 1 (a hidden parttiton) containing a samll Windows bootable backup partiton with the PC's boot.ini file for all bootable OS. Now that this drive1 is dead, theere is no valid MBR + boot.ini to get the system booted.
Drive 2 is a larger drive with freespace (enough to accommodate all of drive 1's partitions). And drive 2 has all of the running OSes in their own partitions here.
The way the system used to work before drive 1 crashed, today, is the system would boot, the boot.ini on drive 1-partition 1 would be invoked and the MS Boot Manager would display. If no selection was made, the system would proceed to boot a Windows which physically is on drive 2.
Here's my question as I think GRUB4DOS may be a blessing in this situation. Assuming I remove Drive 1 from the system.
- Can I use GRUB4DOS, either via your CD or via a boot diskette to start the OS on the remaining system drive (drive2)?
- Can I instruct GRUB4DOS to search the remaining drives for OSs? I know I can use a running QuickSEt to see the partitions by mounting drive2.
- If I get QuickSet or GRUB4DOS diskette to get to the GRUB4DOS menu, can I hit esc, type "e" or "c" and enter a couple of commands to manually kick the system to boot? This assumes I know the partition number(s) I want to boot
. - Do you have an example somewhere?
Thanks in advance for your insights