Andy said:
Because of a problem that developed when a defragger could not finish,
I was left an un bootable disk.
I did a MBR repair and got XP up.
But it is a dual boot system, or used to be, and Linux is on the hard drive as well.
I made a disk image on another drive.
I would like to recover those areas that Linux used without messing up my XP install.
I posted to several Linux forums and of the suggestions I tried, nothing has worked. When a beta program was suggested, I decided to try here first.
Anyone with a similar experience who found an answer ?
Thanks.
When you look in Disk Management (Start : Run : diskmgmt.msc), you'll
see something like this. (Note that the MBR isn't shown as such,
and I only put it in the diagram as a reference to your MBR repair.)
+------+-----------------------+---------------------+------------+
| MBR | Healthy (System) C: | Linux file system | Linux swap |
+------+-----------------------+---------------------+------------+
Linux can have relatively bad table manners, in that the swap may be
in an Extended + Logical partition, but that doesn't change things
too much.
With Disk Management, you can select and delete the partitions, toe
two of them on the end. That should result in any Extended partition
and the Logical being removed. That is, unless you were using
Logical partitions before all of this started. If so, then things
could be a bit more messy.
Once it looks like this...
+------+-----------------------+----------------------------------+
| MBR | Healthy (System) C: | Unallocated |
+------+-----------------------+----------------------------------+
you are pretty well done with the removal phase. You can define
a new partition in the Unallocated area if you want.
The GRUB boot loader that Linux uses, may store info in:
1) MBR area (440 bytes code, which you've already repaired and that is
why C: with WinXP is booting).
2) Track 0 area. From sectors 1-63, GRUB sometimes puts a bit more code
in there. It is unimportant to clean this out, since the MBR no longer
links to the code in any way. Windows will not be dependent on what
Linux overwrote in there. So that area is a non-issue. You could
clean it out by overwriting the area with "dd", but that's silly.
It's not hurting anything.
3) Like other OSes, Linux will have some stuff near the file system
header. But since you've deleted all the old Linux partitions
using Disk Management, this is a non-issue as well.
So really, repairing the MBR was the bare minimum to do after
trashing Linux. Removing the partitions in disk management,
frees up the space for other things.
The above, covers a common thing I might have seen here. There
are all sorts of more complicated things you might have done,
but if you'd done those, you'd already know how to undo them.
Paul
