Problems with MBR... or, whatever it is...

The_I

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Oct 15, 2003
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Beginning to play with Linux on a workday was probably not a good idea. Actually, it was a very bad idea as I was not nearly as patient and considering as I'd usually be which resulted in making pretty serious errors, and making even more serious ones in attempt to fix the previous....

What I did initially was getting problems with Linux boot-manager, I think I configured it wrong so it looked for windows in the wrong partition, which made me unable to boot. As I said I was tired, and in the process of checking whether the windows-installation was 'still there', which I used the winXP-installer for, I accidentally went a step to far, and it destroyed my windows xp installation, my bad....

Oh well, it's not that I'm not used at doing re-installs, and I even had the proper ghost-images to do it easily.

The problem was that I still hadn't got rid of the Linux boot-manager, and as I hadn't figured out how to configure it I simply wanted to get rid of it. A comrade (who uses win9 gave me the advice to use the command 'fdisk \mbr' which should replace the current master boot record with a default one, problem is, as it later turned out, that this command is no good with winXP....

Now I have myself a whole new problem. I can't boot anything at all that boots from the hard disk, I get an error saying (translated from Danish):
"Error initialising operating system"
I've tried restoring a ghost-image to my drive, still same error, I've tried cloning a partition with a working winXP from an older hard drive with no luck either and I've tried the 'fixboot' and 'fixmbr' in the repair winXP-console, still same problem.

I'm pretty much at a loss about what the heck is wrong, and how to get the hard disk to boot anything again and I would rather not format anything but my system partitions as I have quite a bit of data (mostly ripped cd's) that I can't format and which would take some time to replace.

Any good ideas? - I'm running out....
 

sparky853

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Jun 25, 2003
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When you used the fdisk /mbr option, did you boot from the floppy?? For this to work properly, you need to boot from the floppy and run "fdisk /mbr".

I know, I've needed to use it lots :smile:

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Intel P4 2.4B
MSI 645E Max-U Mobo
1GB DDR333
R9600XT 128MB
SB Live 5.1
WD 60GB
Maxtor 120GB
LG DVD+-R/RW
WIN2K PRO SP4