Desperate help needed! MBR problem

[ashecorven]

Hello,

I recently installed suse 10.1 on my machine to dual boot with windows xp
using grub.

The opensuse 10.1 was very basic with minimal changes. Linux and XP were
both installed on the same hard drive on separate partitions. XP had 20G
for itself and 3 for swap while suse had 130G and 3G.

However, after buying a new machine I decided to make it opensuse only and
my older machine xp only. So I tried to uninstall suse (referring to these
pages: http://tr.opensuse.org/SDB:How_to_Uninstall_Linux and
http://tr.opensuse.org/SDB:Uninstalling_the_Boot_Manager_GRUB_from_the_MBR).
But neither the changes in YaST2 or fixmbr on the Windows XP recovery
console changed anything.

I came to the conclusion that the MBR was being re-written before
rebooting and therefore it was still booting into GRUB. So I deleted the
linux partitions (from windows) and made them into one NTFS partition for
windows. There was now 3 partitions XP system, swap and the new empty NTFS
partition.

On reboot (accidental - knocked the power cable loose - i don't reboot
often) I received 'Disk Boot Failure: Please insert ...' as I (half)
expected and once again went into the XP recovery console and used the
fixmbr command. Unfortunately this still made no changes and I cannot boot
into windows. I've been trying to fix this all day to no avail. The worst
thing is that I have many (non-backed-up photos) and my new resume (again
not-backed-up yet).

Things I have tried:
*fdisk /mbr - (apparently the same as the fixmbr command) however /mbr
switch does not exist.

*Active Data Recovery UNDELETE - It cannot read the disk at 80h and I
can't make any further changes. But using another program that was on the
Active Data Recovery boot CD I found that the partition table was still
intact and could view the files on each partition on the hard drive.

*Magic Boot Disk - I had created one a few months back and had used it a
couple of times for simple things but now when it comes down to really
being needed the disk decides to stop working.

*DiskPatch - says that there is nothing wrong with the boot sectors on the
partitions? and the mbr is ok.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

Grant.

PS. The annoying thing is that I don't have a floppy drive on the laptop
to create a boot disk from only a DVD burner.

 

[John John]

You're probably running the fixmbr command on the wrong disk. While in
the Recovery Console use the CD command and navigate to the root of the
active partition and issue the fixmbr command from there.

John

 

[Patrick Keenan]

Hello,

I recently installed suse 10.1 on my machine to dual boot with windows xp
using grub.

The opensuse 10.1 was very basic with minimal changes. Linux and XP were
both installed on the same hard drive on separate partitions. XP had 20G
for itself and 3 for swap while suse had 130G and 3G.

However, after buying a new machine I decided to make it opensuse only and
my older machine xp only. So I tried to uninstall suse (referring to these
pages: http://tr.opensuse.org/SDB:How_to_Uninstall_Linux and
http://tr.opensuse.org/SDB:Uninstalling_the_Boot_Manager_GRUB_from_the_MBR).
But neither the changes in YaST2 or fixmbr on the Windows XP recovery
console changed anything.

I came to the conclusion that the MBR was being re-written before
rebooting and therefore it was still booting into GRUB. So I deleted the
linux partitions (from windows) and made them into one NTFS partition for
windows. There was now 3 partitions XP system, swap and the new empty NTFS
partition.

On reboot (accidental - knocked the power cable loose - i don't reboot
often) I received 'Disk Boot Failure: Please insert ...' as I (half)
expected and once again went into the XP recovery console and used the
fixmbr command. Unfortunately this still made no changes and I cannot boot
into windows. I've been trying to fix this all day to no avail. The worst
thing is that I have many (non-backed-up photos) and my new resume (again
not-backed-up yet).

Things I have tried:
*fdisk /mbr - (apparently the same as the fixmbr command) however /mbr
switch does not exist.

*Active Data Recovery UNDELETE - It cannot read the disk at 80h and I
can't make any further changes. But using another program that was on the
Active Data Recovery boot CD I found that the partition table was still
intact and could view the files on each partition on the hard drive.

*Magic Boot Disk - I had created one a few months back and had used it a
couple of times for simple things but now when it comes down to really
being needed the disk decides to stop working.

*DiskPatch - says that there is nothing wrong with the boot sectors on the
partitions? and the mbr is ok.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

Grant.

PS. The annoying thing is that I don't have a floppy drive on the laptop
to create a boot disk from only a DVD burner.

By the way, you make one reference to a laptop. Which machine is that?

One thing you might consider starting with, before poking at the base of the
drive any further, is protecting the data you value.

Remove the drive and attach it to another system, and back it up. USB2
drive cases work very well for this. Or, bypass the problem by installing a
new drive, reinstalling XP and apps to that, and copying your old data back.
I see new 80 gig drives for CDN$50 or less.

If the other system is your SuSE system, just turn Samba on and configure
it, copy the drive contents there, and you can copy it back over network
when the install is fixed.

HTH
-pk