How to make your wife happy - Install Linux

Last night I tried to install Linux on our home PC. I bought a second hard drive so that I could leave the Windows XP installation untouched. I inserted the Linux CentOS DVD and rebooted the machine. All was going smoothly to start with until after I had chosen my keyboard settings. Then the CentOS installer tried to access the hard drives, but it could not find them. My installation would not go any further. I also had some Fedora Core 3 CD's lying around so I started up that installer to see if the same problem would occur but Fedora could see the drives without any issues.

Now this is where the problems really started to begin. I took out all of the CD's and went to reboot back to Windows so I could get on the internet and search for a resolution to my CentOS installation issue but when the computer restarted all I got was:

GRUB

Somehow I had overwritten the master book record with GRUB. I pulled out my Windows XP CD and rebooted the computer with this in the drive. When it restarted it said "Press any key to boot from the CD...", so I did. From here I followed the prompts to repair the existing Windows installation. I think now that I should not have done anything but without being able to connect to the Internet to find a solution I simply pressed on. So I reinstalled Windows and everything seemed to go OK and I logged back into my Windows system. But my CD was Service pack 1 and it had reset the system back to this level. Thinking my problem was solved, I rebooted only to be greeted with:

GRUB

Uh Oh! By this time my wife had been in bed sleeping for some time and came out to tell me to get to bed as well as I had to work the next day. This is when I confessed that I had a small problem with the computer. Around about 6 months ago, our hard disk crashed and we lost a lot of information that I didn't have backed up so she wasn't very happy with this and still blames me for the disk crashing. So she said that if I had lost some of our photos that I would be in trouble. So now I had no choice but to ensure that I got the photos backed up. I rebooted Windows from the CD and without pressing any key as instructed, my Windows booted up normally. So now I got out some trusty CD's and backed up all of our photos. I suggested that the problem was fixed and whenever we wanted to use the computer we simply had to put in the Windows CD first. However she didn't think this was a suitable solution. So I went to bed to dream about how to repair the master boot record.

The next day at work, I took the chance to search on the Internet to try and find out how to fix the master boot record. I found some sites detailing how to boot from the CD into recovery mode and then issue the fixmbr command. So later that night when I arrived home I tried it. However at first it didn't work and this is when I thought I was in big trouble. The last thing I tried was to install a second version of Windows onto my second hard drive and hope that somehow the installation would fix the problem. So I did this only to find that when I rebooted I had the following message:

GRUB

So just for fun, one last time I tried the fixmbr command. Now when I rebooted everything worked. Yes!!!! So then I downloaded all of the updates to Windows to restore my system to the state it was before hand.

So in summary, I still don't really know what happened. I don't know how I destroyed the master boot record in the first place and I don't really know how I got it fixed. But searching around on the Internet I found that sometimes Linux systems don't like it when the disks are configured with "cable select". So I might set these things manually and then try to install CentOS and see what happens. I'll just make sure that any new photos are backed up first :)