pwandrews 0 Posted November 26, 2004 I have a bit of a screwed up situation going on here. I was running a dual system with Mandrake 10 and Windows XP Home. I had Windows on the C:/ drive and Mandrake on my secondary harddrive. I say was because a few days ago my secondary harddrive crashed (loud crunching noise followed by general failure to be harddrivelike anymore) and left me without linux or the bootloader. That alone wouldn't be such a big problem but since the bootloader was on the harddrive that crashed, my windows harddrive will no longer boot either (it says grub harddrive error or something of that sort). I don't have a windows xp cd because my computer came with one of those damned segments on the harddrive for "recovery" (which I can't even access anyway because it won't boot past the bootloader). I installed a floppy drive in the system just for this and got an I/O error when I tried to run the xp 6 disc boot set. I am pretty much all out of ideas here. Any help you guys could give me would be greatly appreciated. Share this post Link to post
blackpage 0 Posted November 26, 2004 gidday pwandrews What you need is to get some bootloader into the MBR of the C-drive. As to how easy this is, depeneds on a few things. But here are a few options ... 1: Re-install MDK10 on a secondary HDD If you have a spare disk somewhere, then attach it as secondary master, flip in the MDK CDs and install MDK10 anew. Towards the end you will come to the bootloader-setup. Check if MDK detected the Windows-install on your primary disk. If so, complete the MDK-install and let MDK write the bootloader into the MBR of the Windows-drive. This should give you a fully qualified boot menu (including windows) again. !!!ATTENTION!!!: If you ain't got no spare disk, and your Windows-partition is NTFS and not defragged, I would refrain from resizing the XP-partition. Try the boot-disk option in that case instead ... 2: Reactivate the primary MBR with bootdisks To do this you should grab the W2k/XP boot-diskettes which can be found probably here ... Various bootdisk-images/links or directly from ... Tools for the doomed (from the makers of doom In any case you need either 3 (w2k) or 6 (xp) diskettes. Boot from these disks and enter the recovery console. Once there type "fixmbr" to have a shiny new master boot record written to your harddisk. There are other options too, involving Linux-live CDs. Though I don't know what level of difficulty you consider acceptable. In any way ... hope that helps Share this post Link to post
