Booting Windows from the Grub Prompt
 

I had Windows XP and RH2 installed onto different partitions on one hard drive and I had a grub menu at startup to choose my OS. I had to delete my Linux partition to free up space. When I did that, the computer starts up in a GRUB prompt now and I don't know how to get into windows. What should I type from there to load windows. Its on my first and only HD on the first partition. Thanks.

Boot up from a Windows boot floppy and type: fdisk /mbr

I don't have a working floppy drive anymore. There isn't a command to boot windows from grub?

There is, but you tossed your grub menu away. ;-)
Too much trouble every boot.
Stick the XP CD in and boot it. There's a "Recovery Centre" (I think that's what it's called) where you can recover (as in rewrite so Windoze will fire up) the MBR.
Simple as that.

Yeah, I could fix it after getting windows to start but before booting to the cd, it starts grub so even with my xp cd in the drive I can't get anything different than grub. If there is a way, could you enlighten me? :newbie:

This is a BIOS issue - get into the BIOS on restart (usually the DEL key while the message/logo is up.
Make the CD first in the list, hit F10, save it, and away you go.

The CD is first. Looks like I came up with a dooozy..

From the grub prompt you can enter the commands from your grub.conf. Amend as appropriate, and hit enter after each line. Don't know that you can run fixmbr from Windows, but this should get you there.

root(hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader + 1
boot

Thank you much. that is the answer I was looking for!

The above commands at the Grub prompt did not work exactly as documented. I had the same scenario with Grub boot loader. Here is the syntax that worked for me:

root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader --force +1
boot

I was running Fedora Core 4.

Command.com problem
 

I had XP and FC5 installed in two different partitions, and just deleted the FC5 partition from within Windows using Partition Magic. To complete the process, Partition Magic had to restart the computer, and when it boots it loads GRUB.

I was able to enter:

root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader --force +1
boot

and windows started to boot, however shortly after it comes up with the following message:

The following file is missing or corrupt: COMMAND.COM
Type the name of the Command Interpreter. (eg. C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND.COM).

Any help would be much appreciated.

That would probably mean windows is screwed up. What you can do is boot to the windows CD, when it says "press enter to install windows or r to enter recovery console" hit enter and go on with the installing windows thing, then it'll pop up with a menu asking if you want to repair the current install of windows that it has detected on yoru system. Hit r (or whatever the key is) to do this and it'll basically rewrite all the actual windows files without erasing yoru files. There's a chance it might not catch that you have windows, in which case it'll dump you at a screen to partition your HD. If you get there, stuff's really screwed up and you'll probably have to completely reinstall windows.

:) yes, that happen the same to me. Probably my reply doesn't help you now, but maybe it helps to somebody else. There's my solution:

rootnoverify (hd0,6)
chainloader (hd0,1)+1
boot

I tried grub command, I reassure you. I have the same error message.

How can I make an entry for Windows Server in Grub, I have both XP and Server on the same hard drive but I'd like to know if there's a way of having the option to directly boot Server.



My XP entry is

root (hd1,0)
save default
make active
map (hd0)(hd1)
map (hd1)(hd0)
chainloader +1