big OS mistake. please help!

Stripe · 17 Apr 2006 at 11:56

hello everyone.

I'm wondering if someone can help me please. Basically, I can't boot my system at all anymore and I think I may have made a huge mistake. I'll tell you what I've done and then see what I can do.

Basically I have 2 hard drives - one 200gb (of which 137gb is visible) and one 160gb (about 150 visible) both sata, not running in raid. I've been using Norton partition magic and my partitions looked something like this:

I don't use fedora core 4 much at all, but the other day I decided to see something on it. I have the GRUB stage loader thing so basically if I press a key at one select point in my boot up I can select whether to go into XP or FC4. Anyway, FC4 wouldn't load so I just thought I would delete it and install FC5 on the other drive in the unallocated space. So I deleted that partition and extended the WinXP partition across the entire drive so I had something like this:

Now when I boot up my PC I get a small message and then I'm thrown into a dos-style command line where the cursor thing is like: grub2> . Pressing tab brings up some stuff and I can also write "help" but it doesn't seem to do much.

I would just reinstall XP but my disc is at university and I'm not there for another week. I tried using my Dad's XPME disc to do a temporary install so at least I could still see my files but it wouldn't create a partition in the unallocated space for me to do this. I'm downloading the FC5 iso atm but I think because there is no unallocated space on my 200gb drive i might get a bit stuck.

any help would be great thanks.

leezer3 · 17 Apr 2006 at 12:16

Whoops

What you've done is to delete the partition where Grub resides, but not erase it from the MBR. This basically means that the MBR attempts to find a non-existant Grub & drops you to the loader command line.
To get out of this, you really need to run fixboot & fixmbr from an XP Recovery console. Other than this, your best bet is to install the new FC5 onto the secondary disk (Set it as the boot device), and add a new Grub entry for the Windows install on the secondary disk, this one should work:

title Microsoft Windows XP Professional
root (hd1,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

-Leezer-

BigBoy · 17 Apr 2006 at 12:17

you need to boot fromt the CD or download the 6 Floppy disk set and enter the repair console option 'R' once it has booted then logon to the partition with windows on it and type the following

Fixmbr
fixboot
chkdsk /R

reboot and all should be done.

It seams im following you

^^

Stripe · 17 Apr 2006 at 13:39

thanks for your help guys. I tried the fixboot, fixmbr, chkdsk /R thing but it hasn't seemed to work. So I'll wait for FC5 to finish downloading and give that a whirl.

Cheers.

Stripe · 17 Apr 2006 at 13:51

erm, I just got back into windows XP.

Basically, at the grub> line from leezer's suggestion i typed:

rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
boot

and it booted up into XP fine.

I'd rather not have to go through that every time i want to boot up though so any further ideas as to what is going on please? maybe just put the savedefault and makeactive commands in?

sorry, I feel bad asking questions.

hp7909 · 17 Apr 2006 at 13:54

Funny, FIXMBR normally works for me :confused:

But, i'd installed Windows Recovery Console first, i.e. as a boot option.

Stripe · 17 Apr 2006 at 14:26

hp7909 said:
Funny, FIXMBR normally works for me But, i'd installed Windows Recovery Console first, i.e. as a boot option.

do you think it could be because the recovery console I used was from a windows XP Media Edition and I'm using XP Home?

I resized the XP partition to make enough unallocated space on that drive so I'm (nervously) going to put FC5 on later today anyway so hopefully that will somehow restore the menu system I had previously.

sorry for posting so much. i'm not trying to up my post count or anything.

thanks.

PinkPig · 17 Apr 2006 at 14:32

I did exactly the same as you some time fairly recently, fixmbr didn't work for me either - I did find after some searching a reason why it might be. Anyone, a Linux installer detected Windows and set up GRUB to boot into it for me, I ended up for quite some time with a Windows-only machine with a tiny partition that ran Grub to boot into it, odd, but I expect it will save the system for you.