Deleted old partition and getting error message 17

[completenovice 0]

Hi guys, hope i posted in the right area of this forum?

 

I have win xp mce installed but a while ago i (with the help of a friend who knows about such things) was messing around with ubuntu. During this messing around it apears some partitions were created and grub 1.5 installed i thnk! I forgot about this and in disk manager i deleted oe of these partitions to create more space for my data. I reformatted this new space fat32 and named it drive M.

 

All was fine when running last night but after restartign this morning i get the message loading grub 1.5 and cannot load grub error 17 which i believe means cannot mount drive.

 

Looking at this forums previous post i tried to boot from windows cd and then repair console but i get the message that this cannot be done as there are no hard drives installed?! I get this same message when trying the reinstall windows function.

 

Any advice or input would be great, i really do not know enough to be doing this so I'm hoping you guys can help me out of a tight spot!

 

thanks

[Philipp 6]

Which version of Windows are you using? It seems that Windows XP have sometimes problems with LVM enabled Linux partitions.

 

You could try to remove the Linux partitions in question with a Linux installer/installation CD. Then you need to fix the master boot record with the Windows recovery console.

[completenovice 0]

Thanks for the reply,

 

Im using xp mce 2005 sp2

 

At the moment I have 2 hard drives, both sata, one for data only the primary drive has a 40gb partition for windows and 260gb which i recently formatted fat32. Im a little confused as to where the grub is located. Do you think that by removing the 260gb partition and making my windows drive cover the whole hd that this will remove linux and the grub.

 

The only prob I can see there is that that may involve reformatting the drive and reinstalling windows. not too much of a big deal but at the moment windows recovery does not recognise any drives as they are sata

 

cheers!

[Philipp 6]

No, removing the FAT32 partition will not help.

 

Sound like you have no longer any Linux partitions on your hard drivers? In this case you just need to remove the master boot record of the first hard drive to get rid of grub.

 

An alternative way clearing the master boot record is using a Linux live CD. Boot up the Linux live CD and open a command shell window. Then run the following command:

 

Code:

dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/sda1 bs=446 count=1

 

This will remove the master boot record of the first SATA hard drive (= /dev/sda1).

[completenovice 0]

Ive been trying to do that. Ive been running ubuntu 7.10 from the disk but it freezes just after giving me the wallpaper on screen, in safe graphics mode it isnt supported by my ggrqphics card. Ive had this prob before with linux.

 

so I cant get at it through win restore as my sata hard drives arent recognised

 

I cant get at it thr9ugh linux because linux freezes before it boots

 

Is there another way?

 

thanks

[Philipp 6]

Some motherboards have a setting (SATA Emulation) in the bios setup to emulate IDE hard drivers (Legacy Mode IDE).

 

If that not help you can also try another Linux live CD distribution. There are a few out there. Some are even for diagnosis and rescue.