I have recently bought an Acer One net pc. I installed Ubuntu as dual boot with Win XP Home. I couldnt get Ubuntu to work due to a problem with wireless drivers. I tried to read around but none of the solutions offered worked.
Well, anyway, i boot WinXP and delete the partition containing Ubuntu. Now my system will not boot at all! Grub loader of course gives an error at startup and i have no access to windows. I tried to use the usb drive where i have Ubuntu to re-install it and work it from there, but the partitioner will work anymore either.
Please help me!! Is there a way to make a recovery usb drive for windows? or any version of Linux bades systems that will work on my pc from this point??

Thanks!!!!!

Their are a couple of ways to fix this, If your intending to install a version of linux later on then I would place in a Linux Disc and do a simple install of Grub, as you deleted Ubuntu you deleted all of Grubs configuration files and thus what is causing the problem. Else wise, place the windows CD in the system and load up a recovery console, run fixmbr and that should resolve the issue.

*cough i did this once myself, GRUB Stores Itself on a hidden partition, So.... To Fix This Insert The WinXp Disc, Go Into (R) Recovery, And Then Restore I think its either mgr or bootmgr or mbr or somthing i forget ! Hope this helps. I had to get rid of vista for this once> The disks for vista were on a partition that i had to delete

Thanks for quick reply!
But the problem is that Acer One has no optical unit. Hence... no CD.
The motherboard supports booting from USB but i can't find any way to make WinXP bootable usb drive...

The easiest will be to just go and get you a USB dvd drive and follow the directions above to get to a restore prompt and type in
fdisk /mbr

If you have a usb floppy around you could also go to bootdisk.com and download a win 98 boot disk.

Just an idea, you can create Live Linux USB by following tutorial from www.pendrivelinux.com

Thanks, i am going to try this out now. I have tried to install Ubuntu 9.0 from pen drive, but the partitioner kept on giving me an error and would not proceed to install Ubuntu... Since it only says "resizing partition failed" i can't understand what went wrong... but i am trying to take 2 different versions of Linux from your link and see if i can do something about it. But if the partitioner fails again all i can hope for is a way to recover the original MBR and remove the grub loader. And i cant find any post about that anywhere...

The last couple of post have been how to add the original boot loader back to your system. But you said that you don't have an optical drive so you can't use the boot windows disk. That is why I said earlier that if you have a floppy drive then you can download load a boot disk and rebuild the windows mbr

the reason this happened is that grub needs to grab the boot information off the drive that your deleted.

The pendrive linux will work but you will have to create a parition to hold the boot information.

I have now made a USB drive bootable with Linux. No help ((
Im starting to get desperate now... :P
The system boots with no problems, but besides being unable to load the drivers for my wireless card, it will not install the system Just as before, i get an error message from the partitioner. I dont understand what the problem is. And i can not open the C:\ drive because WinXP is hibernated. However, following the instructions from pendrivelinux.com i noticed that mbrfix got installed on the USB key. is there a way to access that??? maybe that would solve all my problems...

I do not have any other USB device. only flash drive... if only i didnt trash my old usb HDD..... eeehhh

If you have the win xp disks, put them in (This happened to me a while ago) Then go into the recovery and restore its either bootmbr or bootmgr i forget !

Can you get into grub prompt? [while it shows you a menu, press "c" to get the prompt]. If yes then from grub prompt type:


grub > rootnoverify ( press TAB to select root for winxp, it might be (hd0,0) then press ENTER

grub > chainloader +1 press ENTER

grub > boot press ENTER

this is to manually boot winxp

Hurry_Hui,
I did not get the grub prompt. All i got was GRUB LOADING STAGE 1,5 ----- GRUB LOADING, PLEASE WAIT... ----- ERROR 22
and system freeze there. So i managed somehow to get a grub boot from usb drive and it gives me the chance to bring up the grub prompt.
I followed your instructions but after typing BOOT i get exactly the same result... Error 22 and system freeze...

Hurray!
for further reference... WinToFlash 0.4.0017 beta has solved all my troubles!