Seeking advice on Windows XP MBR

Montey · Post by **Montey** » Sat Feb 04, 2006 12:58 am

Hey all,

Well I've just been doing some mucking around with my HDD partitioning (fragging a Linux partition I don't need on this drive anymore and turning it in to an NTFS partition).

The concern I have is I may have just fragged the MBR that was running the GRUB boot loader, meaning the next time I boot this machine there is every chance it has no MBR and hence won't boot.

What I'm looking for is advice from you Windows guru's (not me, I'm in to the *nix variety) as to what I do if this is the case and the system finds no MBR upon a reboot.

How would you recommend recovering the system, without reinstalling everything from scratch.

Things to note:
- I have no FDD drive.
- I have CD/RW drive in the machine.
- I have USB ThumbDrive, but can't format it as it has work stuff on it.

So what do you think?

Pinger$ · Post by **Pinger$** » Sat Feb 04, 2006 5:09 am

I'm assuming this is a dual boot windows - linux machine.

Sorry mate.... can't help. I'll ask a guru mate of mine.

You could try running a Knoppix bootable cd

Post by **Shonky** » Sat Feb 04, 2006 9:10 am

Not sure if it will work but you can boot a windows XP cd and login using the recovery console, once logged in try using the "fixmbr" command.

pixelboy · Post by **pixelboy** » Sat Feb 04, 2006 9:34 am

or fire up fdisk from a dos prompt (1in98 book disk is the go) and mark the windows drive as "Active".

Should do it.

ysu · Post by **ysu** » Sat Feb 04, 2006 11:24 am

When I did this (exaclty: I farked up a windoze hdd's mbr with linux) the only way out was to go to a mate and copy the mbr of an exact same HDD. Funny but this one worked. With some very low level tool, I can't remember the name as this was years ago. Maybe diskedit?

But the good news is that it was win98 so with xp you may have better luck.

edit: fdisk could not even see the partition, hehe.

Pinger$ · Post by **Pinger$** » Fri Feb 10, 2006 7:32 pm

Supposedly putting the XP disk in and repairing the MBR should do the trick...

I think what happens is the GRUB loader will still be there, but it tries to access the linux partition, which no longer exists... which obviously causes issues :P

petey · Post by **petey** » Fri Feb 10, 2006 9:11 pm

Yep i'd go with booting from Xp cd and going to recovery, had same problem lol, phoned my Nerdy microsoft uncle and thats what he suggested, did the trick.