Linux 101: grub recovery

When you messed with many OSs, boot strap loader might point to somewhere you don’t want it to be. grub considering the best – easiest? – to deal with many OSs and of course, it’s easy to tweak or  adjust as well.

Firstly get into any sort of shell. There are basically 2 parts needed to be done: set active partition and set MBR back to point at grub again. The first part is fdisk, there is ‘m’ for help. All you have to do is set the partition where grub is to active. Others are not.

The second part: set MBR point back to grub. That’s easy via grub command shell

grub-shell

The easiest way to find partition referenced by grub is to find it

find /boot/grub/menu.lst

Then you have to set toot and setup the hard drive. Then you are all set. For grub menu, Linux needs

Title XXX
   root (hd0,0)
   kernal /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/…bla bla bla
   initrd /boot/initrd

For Windows, you just need to link to Windows boot loader again.

Title Windows XX
   rootnoverify (hd0,0)
   chainloader (hd0,1)+1 # this is Windows partition.

That’s all you have to do. pretty easy, right?

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iPhone OS 3.0 – Major update to crash Pre?

image

No matter how Apple wants to say this is a big update. It looks like updating features waiting for Palm Pre to me.

* copy & paste
* SEARCH!!
* finally more Bluetooth support!
* Apple Push notification service [seems like Apple wants taking control of everything to me though]
* more GPS support
* etc.

Apple Push Notification Service Apple SDK iPhone 3.0

Although there will be thousand of new API, I still don’t think it will change anything and make anything more exciting to well-established platform like iPhone. Jail-breaker one still is the way to go anyway—more apps, much cooler apps without any interferer. However, there is one thing that could make a difference—search. I would love to see how Spotlight goes in this update, that’s probably the only thing that makes Palm Pre look so great over iPhone to me. With the delay of Pre, I bet iPhone will rule mobile arena for another year comfortably. But $9.xx bucks for iPod Touch user again? That’s a lot. Thinking of $20 last time for 2.0 and a few more for minor updates. Such a greedy Apple.

All in all, I hope there would be a lot more “potential opponents” like Palm Pre over the next year, so iPhone 3.5 or 4.0 will catch up all iPhone 1.0 promise such as Flash eventually. What the heck are you doing Microsoft?? You were better than this  :-P I was so wrong; Windows Phone (formerly Windows Mobile) and all RIM army are still out there standing firmly—we shall see if they will be over hype of Jesus phone or not.

Q4 2008: WM beated iPhone in term of sale, not hype; also RIM shipment over last 2 years never go down a bit [over iPhone always of course]

That’s going to be much more interesting this year. If I were Palm, I would quickly unleash Palm Pre before the *hype* was gone although there still are several bugs or unfinished work—just disable/hide it like Apple did to iPhone.

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