Win xp/7 dual boot screw up

pbeadle

Distinguished
Oct 23, 2009
5
0
18,510
I had my primary HD setup with winxp and installed win7 on my secondary HD. Now that I've removed my secondary HD I still have an annoying dual boot message at every startup where I must select "previous version of windows". I thought I could simply resolve this by running the recovery disk and using fixboot, fixmbr. However now I'm left with a bootup error NTLDR not found. If I plug the drive into another machine it shows as a useless 1.5mb FAT partition with some random filenames on it. If I try to run windows repair it asks to reformat the drive.

Any ideas?
 

sub mesa

Distinguished
You could have simply resolved the issue by editing boot.ini file in the root of your system drive, which is a text file which you can edit to change the boot menu, and also configure it to wait only 1 second for example before booting the default windows.

But.. you didn't so let's try to resolve your issue..

You say you had 2 disks, and installed Windows 7 on the second disk, but the primary disk contains WinXP and you connected only the WinXP disk right now. You should not see a FAT partition; i assume you did not create that by itself. Could you give me a listing of your current partition?

If possible, a great tool to fix these issues is a Linux livecd, for example any Ubuntu cd will do and allows you to boot and check your disk, mount it, and correct errors. For example, with the command "fdisk -l /dev/sda" you will get the output of the partition tables on your first harddisk. There should also be a graphical partition editor called GParted, which resides in System -> Administration -> Partition Editor. This can be used while booted from the livecd, without any change to your computer.
 

pbeadle

Distinguished
Oct 23, 2009
5
0
18,510
I connected the winxp drive up to my ubuntu box as a secondary drive. With the fdisk command I get the following output for this secondary drive:
Disk /dev/sdb: 250.0 GB, 250000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30394 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000081

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 2 30393 244123740 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sdb5 2 30393 244123708+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

Under System -> Administration -> I do not actually have 'Partition Editor'
 

sub mesa

Distinguished
FAT16 are you sure? This seems to contradict with the fdisk output you gave me. If the drive is really /dev/sdb (the second SCSI/SATA harddrive) it shows you have a NTFS partition there called /dev/sdb5. You may even try to mount it, to see if you can access the partition. I do recommend you mount it read-only, for example with:

sudo mkdir /mnt/ntfs
sudo mount -t ntfs -o ro /dev/sdb5 /mnt/ntfs

The -o ro will let it mount read-only, meaning it won't change a single byte on the filesystem so it can't damage anything (though rare).

What is your highest priority by the way, getting the data currently on the NTFS partition back, or just getting a working windows installation? If you don't need the data, just re-install windows on the drive. If you do need the data, perhaps you can mount it using Ubuntu and then copy all the contents over the network to another drive, or external drive.

Its possible the FAT16 parition is the small system partition created by Windows 7, it should be 100.0MB large in that case. Could you post a screenshot of the Gparted partition editor maybe? Pressing the print-screen button on your keyboard should let you create a .jpg to upload (to imageshack.us for example).