o god, what did i do
 

huge problem...not directly related to linux, but more directly related to grub or lilo or any boot loader...

ok, here is the deal...

earlier today, i had 3 partitions...

1- an old vista beta install. no longer used for vista, but used for the free space still there for storage purposes.
2- an XP partition. my main OS. i know most of you guys probably hate xp(and vista), but i play a lot of games, and i just could never get past the overly text based linux distros. im just used to windows and i get no errors on it.
3- a fat32, purely data harddrive. music, movies, games, back up files, anything that wasnt an OS was on this hard drive.

now, 1 was on an IDE drive and is 30 gigs. 2 and 3 are on a 200 gig sata drive. the sata runs through a pci card because my mobo is so old, it doesnt have a sata slot.

around mid night, i decided that i wanted vista gone and i wanted all that extra space, so that i could make that 30 gig hard drive completely anime.

so i formatted it.

now the pc wont boot into windows.

now, i hadnt even touched the vista boot in nearly a year, it was never doing anything. but for some reason, my pc thought it was neccessary to have vista there.

everything i have tried has failed...massivly. someone near by (i live in a dorm) has a few bootable linux CDs, can we got one of the mandrake ones to work. yay!...it sees all 3 hard drives. all is going well...but i still cant boot into windows.

what im hoping someone here can give me, is a fix through a boot loader. lilo or grub or something, that i could install on the 1 partition, even if its tiny. i could make the smallest partition possible or maybe a few steps larger, and install this boot loader onto this thing, and then have it boot me into windows. the problem is, all this boot loaders have to get installed THROUGH linux, which neither myself nor my friend are good at using (i went through 3 versions of linux and just decided that for my purposes, it was too much work). my mobo bios dont see the pci/sata harddrive, and thus cant boot it. but i bet lilo or grub could.

so...

can anyone help me?

Stick an XP CD in and boot it. Hit <r> like the message on the splash screen says to get into Recovery Console.
Run fixmbr
Reboot.

In the (probably unlikely) event that doesn't work, your ntldr has been updated to the Vista version - re-install XP.

What Linux versions have you tried? Although i would recommend Ubuntu.

im giving that a shot.

and reinstalling XP is actually one of the first things i tried. i was going to install it on drive 1, and then just drag most of my files over to it, and maybe even try and get my registry to come over so that it would see all my programs and jazz...

well, it gets really far into the install and then says it needs to reboot to continue the install, and after the reboot, it doesnt pick up where it left off.

as for linux, i tried fedora core 3, mandrake 10.1, fedora core 4, and now ive used the mandrake live CD.

im currently checking out fedora core 6 out of interest, because fedora is the one i got farthest with. my problem is that i play lots of games, and more importantly, want to develop games. important programs simply do not run on linux smoothly and im just much more comfortable with windows. explorer.exe is the ONLY windows program i use, and even it has been modified using window blinds. but none the less, i use windows. (as for other programs, i use firefox, winamp, xfire(which doesnt work on linux), thunderbird, and vlc). the biggest issue comes in the fact that i need adobe programs to work which means that linux is completely out of the window. dual booting is just such a pain cause my pc literally takes 5 minutes to boot. the best chance linux will ever get from me is if i get a cheapo laptop that i use purely to run firefox, gaim, and crap like that. which is something im certainly interested in doing, but i cant fund right now.

edit:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing
or corrupt:
<windows root>\system 32\hal.dll
Please reinstall a copy of the file above.

thats what came up after fixmbr.

OK, you've made it perfectly clear by now that you consider Linux a worthless piece of crap and that Windows is the pinnacle of engineering. Fine with me. But stop posting windows questions on a Linux forum. Why don't you go and see a doctor to get your bike fixed, that would make just as much sense...

what ive tried to make clear is that i want a linux boot loader such as grub or lilo, i just dont know where to go to get it.

and why would i post it here?

because this is easily the most intelligent forum i know of.

i dont consider it worthless, im pretty sure that i simply said that i NEED programs to run, that do not run on linux, and so linux is not reasonable for me to use daily. certain things need to run for school and work that do not function well on linux. why would i use a cheapo laptop to run it? because linux CAN run on a cheapo laptop and stuff like vista couldnt. why spend so much money when i dont need so much to run?

besides, you never know what your doctors hobbies are. i just wouldnt take it to him during office hours because id get charged an ungodly amount.

also: right now, im considering installing fedora core 6, just so i can get that boot loader to run. then from there, i can boot into XP and have a fail safe. i just have to wait for my room mate to get home, so i can see if its ok for me to download such a massive amount of data. 5 or 6 ISO files eats up hard drive space rather quickly.

EDIT: ok, i figured out what i want to do....what is the smallest linux that actually writes to the hard drive. not a bootable cd, but actually is installed onto the computer. it needs to come with a boot loader such as lilo or grub and needs to be under 2 gb ideally. i have just under 27 gb of anime i want to put on this 30 gb harddrive. so ill just format just enough space for this linux, and then boot into windows. i can then use linux in the future as a back up, a fail safe. ill be able to boot into it if anything goes wrong in windows.

how much space does fedora core 6 actually eat up on a hard drive?

Windows likes to be installed on the primary master hard drive, if you change it to that and then boot off your cdrom as syg00 suggested, you should be ok, the other problem with windows is the hal.dll. If you do a rescue install from cd it should fix that and preserve all your data. FC 6 I would not recommend for a first install. I am a big fan of the live distros like puppy linux and knoppix, DSL etc etc, as they won't destroy your system if you do something crazy with them (only if the hard drives are mounted read only). The live distros will let you get an idea of Linux without really throwing you into the deep end straight off. They all boot with network support for (most) LAN cards. :)

hey man, thanks for the reply, but check out my newest edit. a much simpler question i think.

The post from jay73 was purile - ignore it.

You have to repair your 'doze install if you expect to use it again. The boot-loaders (all of them; grub, lilo, M$oft whatever) merely provide a means of launching the code in a partition. They ain't a magic bullet.

Try a fixboot (in addition to the fixmbr) from Recovery Console. Else you have more work to do.

RE:o god, what did i do
 

Here is the page for Damn Small Linux, it is 50Mb (or so they say), instructions are for a usb pen drive, but you could change the device to install it on your hard drive. I suggest you open up your box and pull the power cables on all your hard drives except for te one you want to use for your amine and linux. DSL installs on a M$ VFAT partition so you would need to create maybe a 100Mb partition for DSL and what ever other partitions the instructions suggest. Be VERY careful with all this and print the instructions off if you can. If you follow the instructions exactly you should be booting DSL reasonably quickly. You can get the .iso from here. Good luck & happy Linuxing,
Mechdave
P.S. I like to help everyone out if I can, regardless of what experience you have and to actively encourage people to try Linux so they can see for themselves if it is for them... or not! :)

Before running fixmbr make sure to change the active/default/boot flag to XP's partition (with fdisk.) That's all you have to do.

EDIT: And you can do that with Linux's version of fdisk too, before booting into the recovery console.

Clear thinking may help.

You have 2 disks, IDE and SATA.
BIOS cannot boot from SATA.
Your praised Windows cannot boot from secondary HDD. It had some startup files on IDE but you formatted it.

Solution #1: Install XP on SATA in hope it writes necessary files to IDE and becomes bootable.
#2: Install some boot loader (GRUB) on IDE and use it to boot XP from SATA by mapping drives. Please note: GRUB is not Linux, it can be used as standalone boot loader.

Hehehe, I like that one.

Yes, I guess I was too harsh on you but I do think it would be a good idea to look elsewhere (as well) for an answer. I just checked google and I found about a million related entries. It appears to be quite a common issue. And I'm sure some on this forum are MS certified and all that but sometimes there is much more to learn from people who had a little accident like you did and then experimented until they got it right again.

I just wonder how you installed XP the first time round if it's not working now. You could try putting hall.dll on a floppy and restoring it from a liveCD.

Btw, If Linux won't be much more than a recovery system, I doubt whether you really need Fedora. I suggest you use Ubuntu or Debian instead. I'm not saying they are better. Just saying that it's enough to download and install only one CD (the first one in the case of Debian); additional software can then be downloaded as the need arises. You'd be wasting a lot of precious space and bandwith otherwise.

Also, there are Windows-centric LiveCDs that may be of some help... There's BartPE, Hiren's BootCD (the legality of which is highly questionable). There may be others.

But Emerson is right on both counts... You don't need to actually install linux to use Lilo (although Grub reads a config file so that might be different), and your BIOS can't boot the SATA drive because it doesn't have any SATA support (it doesn't realize your PCI SATA card is bootable device either apparently).

blast the lack of multi-quote!

bios can not boot to sata, not because its a sata, but because the sata is running through a pci card and not directly into the mobo. so when i run my set up for the mobo bios, i can not possibly put my sata drive in front of the ide drive. the ide drive is now blank.

jay- you wonder how i installed it the first time? basically, pc came with one hard drive and xp. got new hard drive, 2 paritioned it. linux and storage. reformatted linux to another linux. wanted to beta test vista. o no, i HAVE to put vista over xp. vista wasnt complete, needed xp to play in a CSS match that night. reinstalled xp over on the sata drive. some how, it worked. formatted ide drive(vista) for space. current problem.

im gonna try what syg00 and crito has suggested and then move from there. (they seem to require the least work).

i think my pc still has the ide partition set as the active partition, and now its blank.

edit: ive installed a semi old ubuntu (someone had the CD so i had no reason to burn a new CD(aka: my new burn didnt boot)).

i just need to go edit the grub files to see the other hard drive, and i think ill be good to go.

edit x2: aight, need some help here. ubuntu doesnt see the larger of the two hard drives. i need to make ubuntu mnt those hard drives before i can fix the problem. ive got terminal open, but i dont know what exactly to type. then from there, i have no idea how to make grub see those hard drives and cooperate. dont think im just asking here and waiting for an answer, im certianly looking for a tutorial, but im kinda just googling stuff and may not even be using the correct search terms...so....any help would be greatly appricated.

edit x3: also, my internet doesnt work on ubuntu.