not a fan of cross posting but...

[evendeeper.livejournal.com]

i have redhat 7 on my computer (on the second hard drive) and windows xp on my primary hard drive...i wanted to ger rid of redhat so i tried to delete the first partition on the second hard drive, not knowing that it would do the following after i rebooted

• [minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For the first word, TAB lists possible command completions. Anywhere else TAB lists the possible completions of a device/filename.]


grub>

i hit TAB

• background blocklist boot border cat chainloader cmp color confile debug display displayapm displaymem embed find foreground fstest geometry halt help hide impsprobe initrd install ioprobe kernel lock makeactiv map md5crypt module modulenounzip partnew parttype password pause read reboot root rootverify savedefualt serial setkey setup shade splashimage terminal testload testvbe unhide uppermen vbeprobe viewpoint

now, what in the hell does all that mean? will i be able to get my files off the windows xp drive and what did i do wrong?

thanks 1000x in advance for your help

Comments

[wilaustin.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you need to rebuild your windows boot sector. Were you using grub as your boot loader?

[evendeeper.livejournal.com]

hm...well when the machine turns on, it would prompt me to choose what OS i wanted to use, xp or redhat, so i guess that's a yes

no problem

[zig-mover.livejournal.com]

crap, i just typed a nice reply. and LJ was stupid and deleted it. Hmph..

But I made the same mistake as you, and it's relatively easy to get back into Windows. Just type this at the grub prompt:

grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> makeactive
grub> chainloader +1
grub> boot

Voila!

The first line, root, sets the drive to boot from to the primary drive, first partition. If you have WinXP on a different partition than the primary, you'll need to change that line to reflect this. Example: root (hd0,1) is what you would type for the first drive, second partition. Hopefully it's the first one, but if you have trouble, run FDISK from a DOS boot disk and it'll tell you. Other than thatttttt, that's really all it takes to get back into Windows.

Hope this helps, and that you didn't try anything extreme yet!

-neil

Re: no problem

[evendeeper.livejournal.com]

thank you neil, i'll give it a try

[wilaustin.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if XP is the same as Win2000 in this respect, but I did the exact same thing a while ago. All I did to fix the boot sector was to boot frome the Win2k disk, choose to repair it from the command line, and entered fixmbr(fix Master boot record). It loaded a new boot sector and I could boot directly into Windows.

[evendeeper.livejournal.com]

yea the thing is, my xp drive is first and the RH drive is second and i think it might have been easier to rid myself of the linux if i had put the grub on the RH drive instead of the xp drive...all of this is in hindsight of course

[wilaustin.livejournal.com]

Shouldn't matter. Windows will create a new Master boot record for you. I dual-booted off of different partitions of the same HD, deleted the linux partitions, fixed the MBR and everything worked fine.

hm...

[evendeeper.livejournal.com]

ok i'll try all of this when i get home...thanks for all your help

[natertots.livejournal.com]

What he means by "boot frome the Win2k disk" is the cd.

[oddball42.livejournal.com]

just to add to this is the WinXP cd and tell it to boot to the command console rocovery console or whathave your, from there use the two commands fixmbr and fixboot and you are back. i did the same stuff on my box. and was pretty aware i was going to need to do that.

[wilaustin.livejournal.com]

That's what I meant. I totally forgot about the fixboot command though.

??

[(Anonymous)]

what colour was holden's cap!