help with fixmbr needed

[dragonsongs]

Hello together,

I have a problem with a notebook I was experimenting with. It was dualboot Win XP pro and Redhat linux, and I wanted to test how to get rid of the redhat system to make all space available to XP. (I`ve nothing against redhat, just a test because disk space not too big chosen for XP, 20 GB). So there was GRUB, and normally fixmbr works to get back to original bootloading. But not this time. I can boot from CD to Recovery console, but nothing else. boot.ini looks like this:

[boot loader]

timeout=30

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

[operating systems]

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="DOS" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

dont ask me where the DOS entry comes from. the rest looks quite fine for me, but I am unexperienced here. I can see my hard drive, a boot with redhat showed the partitions (4, 1 for XP, hd0 and the old 3 from redhat. first is ntfs, others fat32 and swap) but cant write a new bootloader with message error 40 and so not boot completely.

Anybody an idea how to get the system booting again? Would be nice without datalost, but not necessary, just for training. Hope somebody can help me.

greets chris

[TheSickman]

boot from original xp cd ( not a nlited version)

choose r ( repair)

you are in repaire console

type fixmbr

[dragonsongs]

Hi sickman,

thats what I did. Now Grub is gone (which is correct), but windows doesn`t boot either.

[TheSickman]

Hi sickman,

thats what I did. Now Grub is gone (which is correct), but windows doesn`t boot either.

in same repaire console

type

fixboot

[dragonsongs]

Did too. No changes.

[dragonsongs]

Okay, I got it!

I started a new windows xp installation, went over the partitioning (made the linux system partition a new xp, but still FAT32), and after data copying and newstart I could choose my old xp installation (two xp entrys in boot menu. had to react quite fast, 2 seconds. Lucky I saw this screen at all, the first time I was too slow and had to restart again). Everything's back. Now I have to check the boot settings, then I think I can wipe off the second incomplete OS and stick to the old one. No data lost, MBR fine again, Chris happy.

have a nice day (I will!)

thanks! chris