i have a laptop that ran windows xp and fedora linux. grub is installed by default.
yesterday, i came up with low space in C: and then i thought since i have other linux machine to try on, i could take off the linux partitions in my laptop. using partition magic, i deleted the two linux partitions which were there and distributed the free space over three windows partitions. the partition magic asked to restart and when i restarted, it started doing the actual deletion and space distribution. but after smoothly completing those operations, it restarted and the windows xp did not boot instead it comes with a black screen with just the word 'grub' on the top right corner.
any ideas, how to fix this. i am very much troubled because of this. thanks.
EDIT: fyi, my laptop does not have an in-built cd drive and i do not have external one as well but i have usb drives with me. i hope this helps.
You need to get into windows restore mode (the windows install CD sadly) and run fixmbr.
If you have another windows XP install lying around you can probably copy the boot sector from that. I take it you know why it's broken? You deleted Grub.. the MBR simply loads Grub from your /boot partition/directory -- which is now gone.
To copy the boot sector from another windows hard disk, you'll need a linux live CD and both hard disks connected.
fixmbr is packaged on the windows install CD, you can probably download it assuming it has no dependencies.
An old windows 98 (at your own risk!) boot floppy actually works too if you run "fdisk /mbr". You'd have to image the floppy disk to your USB drive though and your BIOS will need to be able to boot from USB cleverly. Some BIOS actually have an option to emulate USB drives as floppy disks.
Why can't you take the hard disk out of the laptop? It would be so much easier to fix. They're usually just standard PATA connectors - although you have to yank the little strip off the pins.
chris, what if i copy the entire 580 mb of windows xp home to my usb drive and try to boot from it and run recovery console. i dont know whether the installation would run. what you think?
i have never taken a laptop part out, i am a bit scared
d11wtq wrote:fixmbr is packaged on the windows install CD, you can probably download it assuming it has no dependencies.
An old windows 98 (at your own risk!) boot floppy actually works too if you run "fdisk /mbr". You'd have to image the floppy disk to your USB drive though and your BIOS will need to be able to boot from USB cleverly. Some BIOS actually have an option to emulate USB drives as floppy disks.
i did not see this. i downloaded HP USB disk format tool to make the usb drive bootable. but it is asking me to locate the boot files and i dont have a clue but i have windows xp, windows 98 cds with me. thanks.
But AFAIK, making a CD bootable isn't so simple. There's plenty about making bootable windows recovery USB sticks if you Google
Taking a laptop hard disk out doesn't really require dismantling... they're usually just pushed into the side of the laptop and held in place with a couple of screws. If you have a PCMCIA socket, try looking under that.
i managed to make a usb drive bootable.
so when i boot using usb as first boot device, the DOS prompt comes up with windows 98. when i type dir, it does not show any files in there but shows the size of the disk 512MB. when i tried d:, e:, f:, etc, it told me those drives are invalid.
i have windows xp OS in another usb drive but this drive does not boot on its own. what could i do next?
there was no fdisk utility in there and then i downloaded fdisk and copied to drive and ran from the disk, it told me that it was of incorrect DOS version. i found that fdisk /mbr is only for windows 98 OS and for 2000 and higher, they use recovery console.
the problem is now in this stage; it can be fixed only by recovery console.
i downloaded an iso image of recovery console alone but i dont know how to make the usb bootable using this. is there is any software that can write the iso file into the usb drive so that it can make the usb drive bootable? thanks.
i had one major breakthrough. i have made one usb disk bootable and i did put copy all the windows xp files into the same usb drive. but when i clicked, i386/winnt, it went to windows xp installation, it started inspecting computer and finally told me the following
windows xp requires a hard drive volume with at least 542 mega bytes of free disk space. Setup will use part of this space for storing temporary files during installation. the drive must be on a permanently attached local disk supported by windows xp, and must not be a compressed drive.
setup was unable to locate such a drive with the requried amount of free space.
~raghavan20, come on, think, all you need is fdisk.exe on the drive. FYI, the reason it couldn't find a disk is because the disk is NTFS yet you booted a DOS/Win98 kernel which doesn't have support for NTFS.