Problems getting back to XP after removing Ubuntu
 

Hi everybody,

I recently decided to try setting my computer up for multiple operating systems. I have 2 hard drives on my computer, an 80GB Seagate SATA and a 300GB Seagate SATA. When I was starting this, I already had XP on the first drive, and the second drive was clean, so I created a small partition for Ubuntu on the second drive and installed it on that drive. After a while, I found VMware, and decided to use that for multiple operating systems instead of separate partitions, so I could test out different versions of Linux and such before I decided on one in particular, since I'm quite new to the Linux world. Well, here comes the problem...

I personally liked Fedora better than Ubuntu, and I had experience with it at my school, so I decided to get rid of the Ubuntu partition on my drive to clear up space for other things. After deleting the partition, I have been unable to log into XP. The first error I'm having is in the boot sequence. I'll get to a screen, which will say "Loading GRUB... GRUB Error 17". A friend told me that there was probably something off in the mbr, so I tried to get to the repair utility off the XP boot CD, and I came up with an error "Setup did not find any hard disks installed on your computer." The RAID utility still sees both hard drives as connected and functioning properly. I'd really like to avoid erasing the data I have installed on my primary XP drive if possible. Is there something I need to do in the Linux repair utility rather than the XP?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

hey,

When you load with the XP CD, in the beginning of the blue screen, there is a point where you can load drivers (F6 I think you hit) load the SATA drivers. You want to boot into the rescue mode. Once there, you want to do fixmbr. I believe you're getting that error because there is not a second OS. let us know how that works for you.

Regards,

Brandon

p.s. When they initially put out XP, I don't think that SATA hard drives were all that mainstream, but then they hit big time. I don't think MS put SATA support into the kernel, hence the reason for having to load the SATA drivers. I think that's what it is, anyway. I could be wrong, someone here will correct me if I'm wrong. They usually do.

sup,

The fixmbr command works in startup disks for windows too. Get a blank floppy and find a windows pc; right click on floppy in my computer, then format. click the make startup disk or something options. take disk to ur pc and reboot, then at prompt A:\fixmbr.
Done.

the command for cleaning up the mbr on a w98 or wme start up disk is 'fdisk /mbr' if all is well it will give no indication that it did something, nor will it confirm the succes of the action. in your case you might need to add which drive you want to do like 'fdisk 1 /mbr'. i don't think this floppy will support sata but then there might be a chance that grub was installed on the ide drive. (hda may be?)