Hi i recently upgraded to a new Intel mobo and CPU, and whenever i try to boot i get this message "GRUB" and it's jsut there. It tried repairing the WIndows Bootloader but i get "NTLDR is missing" I know i could just reinstall windows, but i have recovery cds which only let me reinstall it but dont work.

Also i was thinking of trying FIXMBR and FIXBOOT in windows repair but like i said my windows cds don't work. Is there a way to fix this without losing data?

Thanks for any help.
PS: I tried reinstalling linux, but I still get same errors. I tried LIlo but i jsut get L at the boot.

PPS: The thing about those windows cds is that they won't boot...plus they're only recovery cds so it they probably won't let me go into rescue mode. I am currently looking for winXP bootdisks .img files on google that i could put on floppies from MandrakeMove 9.2 livecd i am currently using while writing this very own post.

Does anybody know any bootdisk in .img files? even DOS bootdisk in .img would be appreciated.

I also tried installing Mandrake 9.2 and then it still didn't work. I tried using the rescue cd to write up a new windows MBR and it still didn't work :|

you might try www.bootdisk.com
they have lots of bootdisks

are you trying to dual boot or something?

not really too sure what could be goin on.

Yes i am trying to dual boot, but now my biggest concern is just to be able to boot something. I tried bootdisk.com but they only have .exe, and i don't have any access to windows machine, or have any friends that do.

From my experience, the boot sector MBR is b0rked. I just need to reinstall it somehow.

did you try hitting enter or anything at the lilo or grub prompt?

I dual booted once...had win2k first, then loaded linux onto another hd.
I used dd to dump the first 512bytes or something to a file then pointed the win2k boot loader to that and that booted lilo. never installed lilo to the MBR.
I haven't tried grub either, so I woudnlt know what else to try.

For my latest slackware install i dont think i even installed it to the MBR, its jsut somewhere on the disk or somethign and the drive was made executable.

mebbe you can try and reintall grub?

Might try this...seems to be some tools to read/write dos disks in linux.
http://mtools.linux.lu/

tried hitting enter, it would do anything, i tried reinstalling linux with grub and it didn't work either.

Goto http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ and download the .iso for it. It has MBRTool as well FreeDOS. It's a great utility disk that I recommend anyone to pick up.

For what its worth, I too had similar probs when tyring to set up dual boot arrangements. I have read several third-party texts on the subject and most of them NOW WARN that dual boot arrangements, in the traditional manner of installing them, can render windows unbootable. I went through this very same exercise recently, beathing to death all the variables to get around the problem.

Finally I gave up, rearranged my system with a "pluggable" main hard drive, and that solved my problem. No more headaches and reloads of systems just because of boot loader problems. As hardware and software change, new obstacles, which are not well documented especially be MOBO makers, come into play. I talked with SuSE about it and they concurred that most systems (Linux) are now going to stand alone mode, or pluggables to completely eliminate this major headache. Also makes changing disk sizes much easier --- lots of flexibility for experimenting.

So I am a happy camper with my arrangement. Two pluggable units -- one big socket. I now have NO RESTRICTIONS on what I can or cannot due on a system basis. And it makes the process of trying different loadings of different releases, etc. much easier because I am not always having to RELOAD TWO OP SYSTEMS.... just one, and nice and cleanly.

Much more flexibility when I am using either op system, depending on what I am doing.

Just food for thought.

Cheers --- LB --- :-)

I am now downloading UBCD. We'll see if it works. My last option is just to take out the HDD, CD-rw and a vid card and stick it in the old box and try reformat and reinstall of windows. Then i would stick everything back into the new PC.

It is not due to the new systemboard. The easiest way to fix this issue--I know this because it happened to me 2 weeks ago--is to remove your linux partitions, boot up the UBCD do an F5 (for DOS) then F3 (for FreeDOS) then at the prompt do an fdisk/mbr and Windows will actually boot normally. There is a problem though. The fdisk/mbr just puts a normal DOS mbr on the machine so you will need to get either a set of Win2000 boot disks or a Win2000 OEM CD and just do a repair and it will reset the mbr. Once that is done you can put Linux back on and use whichever bootloader your distro uses.

thing is i only have system recovery cd's that i got from sony. THose are system restoration cd's