Wow. That's some story osiwm. I have a new fear of MBR's too. What a huge PITA!!!

if it helps.. here's wut my partitions look like.

http://paul.mg2.org/psykdskmngmnt.gif

Disk 0 is where my windows is and Disk 1 would be the linux HD. i'm beginning to think that the 12MB of unallocated space might have to do sumthin' w/my NTLDR to be missing. for now, i just want my windows to be able to boot on its own again (w/o a boot disk). i'm going to reformat the second HD for a new linux install anyway.

small schance those 12mb have anything to do with the missing stuff.
HD often have small unformatted part on them, they are just not used.

In case theres still data on the HD:
My advice would be to backup your important files by taking you windows HD as a second HD in another comp, backup to the first HD in the other computer.


Try repartioning with maxblast, a program made by Maxtor. Dunno if it works on other brands of HD's though. It is a pretty easy boot diskette repartioning program, in wich you can specify what OS your going to boot with the HD.

Try reinstalling windows then. If it still doenst recognize your OS installed, you need to use the same program (Maxblast) again, to do a quick zero-fill.
After that everything worked with me.


If your windows works again, try installing linux without a bootloader, and make a bootdisk for linux, much safer...

Sorry psyk, but I think a copy of your windows data and a re-installation is your only chance. I've been working on this same problem for 10 days off and on, and there seems to be more damage done by the Linux bootloader installation than can be repaired by the win2000 recovery console.

As I said, I never even knew my bootloader was going to write to the mbr, but it's sufficiently destroyed now. Come to think of it...I guess the repartitioning tool may have screwed up the windows boot process...I don't know.

This never happened to me with any of the 4-5 different flavors of Linux I've installed over windows before. I think it really sucks that Linux doesn't play friendly with windows...I knew the opposite was true, but this is a very poor action for an alternative OS to take. I hope this problem gets resolved soon as it will certainly anger many would-be newbies to the free software world.

-Mike

Itismike - I think some of your observations are true, even though I like the Linux so far. One problem I have is with RedHat is its convoluted approach to DL of files and installation of same. I bought their Enterprise WS v-3 and have been trying to get the Disc's DL for over a week. Ran into all sorts of problems and as you say, the Linux community needs to be more transparent if it intends to buck heads with M$ and not make we newbies jump through a myriad of hoops. I look forward to getting my WS up and running as it seems to be a good system.

the thing is, that hard drive never had that 12mb of unallocated space before -- ever. at least not until i installed linux. could there be a possibility that windows is looking in that 12mb spot for NTLDR wen it's actually in the other partition of C:? and if that's the case, is there any way to make that disk one whole partition again?

i dunno, jus a thought. i'm up for any rite bout now. rite now tho, i'm gonna get ready to reformat my linux HD, move all my files there, reformat the windows HD, reinstall windows, and start all over. does that sound ok?

I have exactly the same problem, by the way.

I had lilo installed. Then I installed Grub. As soon as grub installed,
my windows booting was toasted - I got a lockup with a cursor whizzing all over the screen.

Tried re-installing LILO. Now lilo shows up first, asks me what to boot from. I can boot linux no prob, but if I choose Windows, then the GRUB menu pops up like before, and after that, I get the lockup with a cursor whizzing all over the screen again...

I tried running windows recover, it replaced the NTLDR and so on, but did not seem to do anythng about the boot sector, because I still see lilo and grub every time I boot.

I'm going to try downloading the WIN V Lilo, but I suspect it won't work since Grub has installed itself somewhere *inbetween* lilo and windows...

oddiofile, consider reinstalling either LILO or Grub to the MBR.
For LILO you would just run '/sbin/lilo' as root. I am not familar with the Grub command.
If you keep getting the NTLDR missing stuff you may want to check out this thread.

EDIT: It would seem the Grub command is here.

Just a suggestion...check your boot.ini file in the win2K partition. Sorry I can't explain exactly what's going on, but look at the thread that 2damncommon refers to. Good luck!

2damncommon - I did reinstall lilo into the MBR. Lilo comes up first,
gives me a choice of whether I want windows or linux. I choose linux, it boots.
I choose windows, then AFTER THAT I get a GRUB menu. At that point, whenI choose windows (again), grub hangs.

I guess Grub has installed itself somewhere between the MBR and the booting of windows. And wherever it is, the Windows 2000 Recover sequence doesn't see it either.

To ItIsMike: I can see the boot.ini file from linux,

[boot loader]
timeout=1
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastd
etect
C:\="Unidentified operating system on drive C."

Edit: Just realized it is not NTFS but actually FAT32...

I can boot from a win98 startup disk and it doesn't recognize the media
as valid, but linux recognizes it and I can access the files, at least.

I do not use Grub, but LILO gives install choices of MBR or individual partitions.
If Grub does the same then it is installed on the partition that LILO wants to boot as Windows.
If your /etc/lilo.conf points to the correct partition for Windows, then it would seem that Grub has somehow been installed there. And it is apparently not configured correctly to boot Windows.
Sounds like the next option is to check for a Grub uninstall command.

yes try:
fixmbr
this should override the mbr and put a fresh win 2k one in your win2khd. To get to this file boot up using the win2k cd once in the cmd promt execute this file...
*note*
if you do, it will take lilo off your MasterBootRecord...then try to install LILO again using a repair off you linux installation cd

please disregard last post
<----kinda slow(approx 3 pages)
heheahaha

any FC2 users should have a bo peep at a broken package reported here that may help.

I don't use FC or XP myself.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...7&highlight=FC

At the same time that this thread is active again, I have more to share. (That's not a good thing!)
Also, this is not an invitation for some smart ass to tell me what a dummy I was for doing this to myself again.

I had win2000 on the first 10 gigs of an 80-gig drive. All was well and good until I began to run out of space. "No problem," I thought, "Just open the other 70 gigs up and put my data there." Unfortunately, Windows was unable to see the other 70 gigs (technically, the graphical display on the disk management window showed a full 80 gigs in some strange color, while if I clicked 'info' it reported that it was only 10 gigs...?), and a partition editor on a Knoppix disk didn't work either.

So, I installed Mandrake 10 beta AGAIN, this time on a separate drive, and told it to put the boot info in the /boot directory on the Linux drive...

in other words, according to my install preferences, I had requested that Linux NOT TOUCH the boot sector on hda1. Well, you guessed it...It wiped it out again.

NTLDR not found. Press enter to reboot.

I could nearly pull my hair out. So I tried fixboot and fixmbr from the win2000 install disk, and tried to find a Linux tool that would let me read and write to my NTFS partition to edit my boot.ini file and make sure all was ok, but I couldn't find an effective tool. Having reached a point where I was running out of ideas, I let Windows Repair process try an automatic fix.

That was a BIG mistake. After warning me that the boot sector seems unconventional and it was about to make permanent changes that could be irreversible, I let it eat (so to speak.) A second later, text scrolled the screen up and I was left with

Complete.
C:>_

then I looked up to see what it had reported...

Recognized a FAT32 filesystem.
repairing damaged filesystem.

NNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!

Yep. Windows 'automatic repair' thought it was working on a FAT32 disk, when it was actually a NTFS. Well, it repaired it alright! I mounted the drive from Linux to take a look...EVERYTHING was completely scrambled.

Time to reinstall again...now where's the backup disk I made 3 months ago??

Mike