Oh boy, I'm in trouble (can't get to XP)

Hamel · Post by **Hamel** » 2004-03-11 12:14am

About half a year ago I had Red Hat Linux installed alongside XP. That was deleted, and two partitions, one a boot for red hat, were left sitting on my hd for who knows how long. Tonight they ended up deleted. Now when I boot from IDE-0, I'm shown a Grub prompt. Of course, I don't know jack about working it~ Either Grub or something else greeted me on startup with the option of choosing XP or RH, so I whatever it was got deleted too.

I have this little feeling that I put myself in quite a spot~ So I need to know if I can salvage anything - if I can access XP, be forced to format, or if I'm totally fucked and lost my HDs.

Thankfully I burned damnsmalllinux before any of this happened, so I'm using it to access the net right now.

Vertigo1 · Post by **Vertigo1** » 2004-03-11 01:27am

All you have to do is boot off of a DOS floppy with FDISK on it and type the following:

fdisk /mbr

Then boot off of your XP CD and I think the command you need to use is FIXMBR or something along the lines of that. Type in HELP to get a list of commands, and I think HELP *command* tells you what it does, and what command line options it supports.

Comosicus · Post by **Comosicus** » 2004-03-11 04:06am

Vertigo1 wrote:All you have to do is boot off of a DOS floppy with FDISK on it and type the following:

fdisk /mbr

Then boot off of your XP CD and I think the command you need to use is FIXMBR or something along the lines of that. Type in HELP to get a list of commands, and I think HELP *command* tells you what it does, and what command line options it supports.

I think the command is FIXBOOT not FIXMBR with XP.

Hethrir · Post by **Hethrir** » 2004-03-11 04:34am

Comosicus wrote:I think the command is FIXBOOT not FIXMBR with XP.

fixboot lets you change the options in boot.ini, and fixmbr formats the mbr, which is what you want to do to trash grub.

Hamel · Post by **Hamel** » 2004-03-11 09:02pm

DOS floppy disk isn't working. I get a boot failure every single time. Trying to boot from the Win XP cd takes me to the grub prompt.

~ Rofl.. Won't let me login as root. No password works. This sucks. I want to access fstab so I can try mounting an ntfs partition.

~ So I use 'sudo' to, I think, gain root access and it still doesn't let me use fstab. What the hell, man?

Hamel · Post by **Hamel** » 2004-03-12 12:53am

WOOO! Mounted hdb1 and 2, which were my x and y drives.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2004-03-12 12:59am

Gah. I can't remember how to do Windows XP in GRUB, but it is possible...

Vertigo1 · Post by **Vertigo1** » 2004-03-12 04:04am

Hamel wrote:Trying to boot from the Win XP cd takes me to the grub prompt.

Did you actually go into your BIOS and set your CD-ROM to boot FIRST or only from it?

Hamel · Post by **Hamel** » 2004-03-12 11:13am

Vertigo1 wrote:
Hamel wrote:Trying to boot from the Win XP cd takes me to the grub prompt.
Did you actually go into your BIOS and set your CD-ROM to boot FIRST or only from it?

Yeah, but I'll double check the "only" part.

Hamel · Post by **Hamel** » 2004-03-12 03:53pm

I don't know what to do, short of a format (don't know if even that's possible). The WinXP cd decided it wanted to boot. So I did an installation repair. I STILL get put in a grub prompt when I boot from my hard drive.

Keep in mind that dos boot disks still do not work for whatever reason.

Edit: Ok, everything is back to normal

The XP cd booted up, so I accessed fixmbr.

Vertigo1 · Post by **Vertigo1** » 2004-03-12 07:07pm

Edit: n/m, you already took care of it.

Hamel · Post by **Hamel** » 2004-03-12 07:09pm

haha, edit city

Vertigo1 · Post by **Vertigo1** » 2004-03-12 07:14pm

Just for the record:

www.bootdisk.com

Nab you a Win95 or 98 (any edition) startup disk. That you can boot off of, boot to the command line and run FDISK.