Restoring Master Boot Record ?
 

Hello friends.

I have a problem at hand.

I have an IBM R51 laptop.
I had a dual boot system with Redhat 9 and Windows XP.

Now by mistake, I deleted the linux partitioni from within windows and converted that partition to a FAT 32 one.

This corrupted the grub boot loader and now when I start my machine, even the windows does not boot.

(In my desktop PC, his had happened before and using the windows boot up floppy disk, I had run "fdisk /mbr" and had restored my MBR.
But in my laptop, I dont have a floppy drive. I also dont have a windows bootable CD.

I have a USB pen drive (64 MB)

Can anyone please help me what to do now?


Thanks

Aditya

why don't you ask this question at the Micro$ucks forum???
there is a nice distro called ERD commander it is aimed to crack any windoVZZ in da house %-) try it and you'll feel much better (doots from CD)

I like to help, even though my knowledge in dual boot XP/Linux is basically 0.

Why don'y you borrow someone's a bootable USB drive. Then enable "Boot from USB" in your BIOS and reboot the system. This would at least let you see if your previous installation is still intact.

Next, use you bootable USB drive to issue a command SYS.COM to transfer the COMMAND.COM, IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS files across. Hopefully, you should be able to restore control of your hard disk without using the USB drive.

how do I make a USB bootable drive for XP?
 

Yes, I can use the USB bootable drive.

But I dont know how to make a USB bootable.

Can anyone help me on this front? How do I make a USB bootable drive for Windows XP?

Aditya

1) Boot off of your XP disk
2) Enter the recovery console (I hope you have an admin password set)
3) After in the RC issue: fixmbr then fixboot
4) And you should reboot into XP hell...

ady's current problem is that he has lost his OS.

ady, one workaround at the top of my head is take the advantage of your USB drive being mobile or portable to be more precise.

Get to a good PC doing Windows XP. Take a blank floppy disk with you. Make a recovery disk from"Add/Remove Programs".

Next insert your USB drive into the PC. Format the drive with system files.

Now you can boot up your PC with either the floopy or your USB drive.

If you can borrow a bigger USB drive say, a 1GB drive. Install Windows 98 into it. Boot your PC from the USB drive. Use the command FDISK/MBR to rewrite the Mster boot record. Repeat 7 times to overwrite all previous data which might still be resident in the MBR.

how do you format the usb-drive with system files?

Personally, given the lack of a XP CD, I'd just boot a Knoppix CD and re-install grub into the FAT32 partition, and use grub to boot XP.

Maybe a winPE solution would also suffice - never used it, but seen it mentioned. Google for it.