MBR - Master boot record?

Still_Learning · Post by **Still_Learning** » 12 Oct 2008, 19:19

I know on a duel ubuntu / win sys ussually you use Grub or Lilo, to select between the windows or ubuntu sytem to boot, correct?

How do you create a menu like that or get into the MBR to write, read, execute stuff?

Which do you prefer Grub or Lilo?

Recently I had some PC problems and my linux seemed to have gotten infected before my windows on the duel boot. I still have the linux partition, but had to reformat my windows pc, but the problem seems to have stemed from a linux shell program in my ubuntu partition, and my windows being more stable.. unless they got to my linux partition FROM my windows..

what do you advise?

Post by **floodhound2** » 12 Oct 2008, 20:31

As far as a dual boot I always install windows first then putting Linux on after. I use grub as the boot loader and don't really modify the MBR. Only time i modify that is if I am using many windows op-systems. i.e Windows 2000, XP and Vista. Vista 64 is different though. I hope this helps.

Post by **bad_brain** » 13 Oct 2008, 03:34

I recommend GRUB, take a look here:
http://www.supergrubdisk.org/wiki/Howto_Fix_Grub

and I doubt Linux was the reason of the problems, in 99.9% of the cases it's Windows....except you had a catastrophic misconfiguration, also there is no way to access Linux file systems from XP (at least without installing extra software). what indications are pointing to malware (a shell as you said) on the Linux system?

once your Linux system is accessible again do a:

Code: Select all

last -50 -i

it will show you the last 50 users with their IPs that have logged in to the system....if there is 1 you don't know: full re-install....