can only boot to grub

[joseph wholey]

Not sure if this is the right place for this post... sorry if it's not, but I think someone here will have the answer. I installed RHEL4 on an HP pc. Now I'm trying to install XP (not dual boot or any of that, just an XP install from cdrom). I know my media is good, and I know my boot process is reading from the cdrom drive. I see/hear it go to the cd... reads a little, the eventually dumps me into grub. How can I get it to read my XP install media? HELP!!!!

[Alexander Chuzhoy]

you have to get into repair mode (after booting of installation CD) and execute fixmbr.

[joseph wholey]

That's the problem... I can't get into any mode... it won't boot to the install cd. It appears that it tries to read it... then it goes to grub.

[Alexander Chuzhoy]

you either have a corrupted CD or your CDROM drive can't read your CD for some reason.

If you can get another copy of that CD it would be a good start.
Few more things to try:
you can boot from win98 boot floppy- you can download it from the internet(http://www.onecomputerguy.com/install/floppies.htm).
you can boot from XP-Live CD.

All above requires at least one working system to do the downloads on...

[Alexander Chuzhoy]

Forgot to mention that if you boot from win98 floppy, the the command to execute would be:
fdisk /mbr

[John Collier]

The only thing I might add to Alexander's suggestion is to simply wipe all the partitions at the same time you wipe the Master Boot Record (MBR). If you really want a clean install that M$ Windoze can live with easily, then there is no good reason not to. After all, Bill and the Boys in Redmond have not made their software nearly as flexible as most of your Linux distros when it comes to disk partitions.