removed linux partition - now XP won't boot

[brendan boner]

i'm trying desparately to restore my windows XP installation, but no
luck so far.

I have a PC that had XP pro (SP1) and and redhat installed on a
partition on the same drive afterwards, with the grub loader. While
clearing up space I removed the linux patition (secondary partition on
the primary physical drive - along with the linux loader on that
partition) and reformatted as NTFS ... no problem so far, i'll just
restore the MBR, as I had done previously.

When I logged into the recovery console, it came up with the previous C:
drive as E:, the newly formatted drive as C: (and a complete other
physical drive previously known as E:, as D:!)

I have tried everything from removing the secondary partition (which
gave me back my c:\windows), to fixmbr and fixboot c: but everytime I
boot up it states "no operating system". All the data is there and
searchable, but how do I get back to booting it (bootcfg finds
c:\windows), bar reinstalling linux and grub again?

 

[Gerry]

You will need to put 3 files on your boot drive, you
should be able to copy them from any system that has a
NORMAL configuration for booting XP Pro. You will have to
go into options on the doner computer and unhide the
system and protected files. Copy these three files:

Boot.ini
ntldr
ntdetect.com

Copy those to your boot partition and it should work.

 

[I'm Dan]

... When I logged into the recovery console, it came up with
the previous C: drive as E:, the newly formatted drive as C: ...

This part suggests the newly formatted partition was the active partition.
Make sure your XP partition is marked as the active partition. The "no
operating system" error is also indicative of having the wrong partition
marked active.

 

[ceedee]

Also linux boot loader will overwrite the mbr on the drive
boot to a dos prompt and use fdisk /mbr to fix the bootsector

ceedee