Calling all Expert XP Admins

I have a problem with a laptop.

I had XP installed and then also installed a Linux distro so im dual booting.

I then wanted to blow away the Linux side of things and return to orginal single booting XP setup.

Here is what i did:

1) Booted from the XP cd and did a "fixmbr" from the recovery section (things went down hill from here)
2) Tried to boot from the hard disk (the computer kept on rebooting after the Dell BIOS screen)
3) When back in and booted from the CD and then issued a "fixboot" from the recovery section.
5) Issued DISKPART from the recovery section and blew away the Partition containing the Linux OS and rebooted
4) This time it display "NTLDR Missing" when booting from the hard disk

thats all i tried before leaving work.

Any ideas??

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seuss_ssues

I would probably boot off of your windows cd again then go to the repair console and triy a fixboot and a fixmbr command.

Try googling your error message and you will probably come up with a lot of suggestions.

If nothing seems to work you can always do a repair install of windows.

royal

Go into the recovery console (repair mode during setup) and type the following:
fixboot c:\
fixmbr

When you installed XP it wrote the boot loader program into the boot sector of that partition. It then told the MBR to use that boot loader program to launch the NTLDR. When you installed Linux for dual-boot, it used the boot loader program for Linux and Linux had knowledge of the dual boot (LILO or Grub) and then Lilo or Grub would take care of the dual-boot. Now that you got rid of Linux and want to go back to XP, you will have to re-write the boot sector with the XP's boot loader. Once you do the fixboot and fixmbr command, XP will re-write the boot sector with XP's boot loader and then fix the MBR so it'll again use XP's boot loader program. It should then automatically boot into XP after those 2 commands are run.

mattsthe2

royal wrote:

Go into the recovery console (repair mode during setup) and type the following:
fixboot c:\
fixmbr

When you installed XP it wrote the boot loader program into the boot sector of that partition. It then told the MBR to use that boot loader program to launch the NTLDR. When you installed Linux for dual-boot, it used the boot loader program for Linux and Linux had knowledge of the dual boot (LILO or Grub) and then Lilo or Grub would take care of the dual-boot. Now that you got rid of Linux and want to go back to XP, you will have to re-write the boot sector with the XP's boot loader. Once you do the fixboot and fixmbr command, XP will re-write the boot sector with XP's boot loader and then fix the MBR so it'll again use XP's boot loader program. It should then automatically boot into XP after those 2 commands are run.

Ok but i already did that, except i did it the other way around

fixmbr and then fixboot.

Does that matter??

slinuxuzer

Also Once you get it fixed you might want to use Vmware if you have enough resources instead of dual booting.

royal

mattsthe2 wrote:

royal wrote:

Go into the recovery console (repair mode during setup) and type the following:
fixboot c:\
fixmbr

When you installed XP it wrote the boot loader program into the boot sector of that partition. It then told the MBR to use that boot loader program to launch the NTLDR. When you installed Linux for dual-boot, it used the boot loader program for Linux and Linux had knowledge of the dual boot (LILO or Grub) and then Lilo or Grub would take care of the dual-boot. Now that you got rid of Linux and want to go back to XP, you will have to re-write the boot sector with the XP's boot loader. Once you do the fixboot and fixmbr command, XP will re-write the boot sector with XP's boot loader and then fix the MBR so it'll again use XP's boot loader program. It should then automatically boot into XP after those 2 commands are run.

Ok but i already did that, except i did it the other way around

fixmbr and then fixboot.

Does that matter??

Yes, it does matter. Go in there again and do it in the correct order and it should be fine.

sthomas

I have had the NTLDR missing error before and one time I had to copy the NTLDR file off of the Windows XP CD onto the Hard drive. Try what royal said first but if for some reason that does not work boot into the recovery console and copy the file off of the CD.

mattsthe2

Well its fixed but i dont know how...

I had to make partition 2 (where XP was installed) active and partition 1 inactive using gdisk from ghost. Partition 1 was a small FAT 63mb parition....is that the MBR?

So when a computer boots up it does the following...

Looks for the first partition on the disk which im assuming is the MBR. The MBR says look to partition 2 to boot. It goes to partition 2 and loads the NTLDR, NTDETECT and boot.ini file to either fire up the OS or if its dual booted present the Dual Boot screen to pick which OS to load...

Is that it??

mattsthe2

ok now let me correct myself.

The MBR is stored on the first sector on the disk. Which tells it to boot to the active partition.

In my case the Active partition was Partition one which is not the MBR but the Dell Diagnostic partition. Gdisk showed the following:

Partition 1 Hidden and Active
Partition 2 Active

I made Partition 1 un-active.

Rebooted and all was well...

hmmmm this is bugging me...