[arch-general] grub lost after boot into windows - seen before

[David C. Rankin]

Guys,

  I have a simple arch install on an older dell box with a single non-raid drive
that still boots with grub. The box is used as part of a media center.
Partitioning is simple, sda1 win, sda5 /home, sda6 /, sda7 swap sda8 /boot. The
box rarely is booted into XP. The hwclock is manually set via the bios interface
when switching between Arch or XP, UTC/localtime.

  A couple of nights ago, I booted XP and left it running. Clamwin runs a
nightly scan via its scheduler. The only thing that ran under XP that I know of
was clamwin, which after using it for years and never seeing this problem before
seems to eliminate it as a suspect. (there were no updates applied, etc...) The
box was left running XP for a couple of days. Upon reboot, the box would
repeatedly reboot to the bios screen. Booting the Arch install disk, chrooting,
and reinstalling grub fixed the problem.

  What could have caused grub to be wiped out? Has anyone experienced a grub
overwrite with XP lately that they have identified a reason for?


-- 
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.