Hello all,

I've searched downloaded burned rebooted for two days with little sleep inbetween. This is literally driving me crazy.

A bad install of linux gave me a grub that won't go away. My only hope of restoring my Windows XP and retrieving the data that was backed up (most wasn't) is to somehow access the recovery partition. That's still there. The primary partition was wiped out.

This is a remanufactured system: I -don't- have a Windows CD. I -don't- have fdisk. I -don't- have any of the utility disks I'd normally use (they're 300 miles away, buried in snow and ice right now).

I do have a disk and a thumb drive with the Windows boot files on it, but grub doesn't recognize these.
If I could just get rid of that grub file, I think
I could boot from either the thumb drive or the cd, or even the partition with the recovery files on it, but I can't get rid of grub. I think even if I could get fdisk on either a cd or thumb drive, grub would override it.

Any one know how to kill that file WITHOUT fdisk and WITHOUT the Windows CD? I have live Linux disks, Ubuntu 8.10 and 10.10 have been the most promising, but still can't do this.

Thanks very much to anyone who knows how to do this.

Lexia

Can you get into Ubuntu?
Did you select side by side installation when asked wher to install?
Usually Ubuntu will recognize windows.
If Ubuntu boots open terminal under Apllications>Accessaries>Terminal
Type "sudo os-prober"
password
then
"sudo update-grub"
no quote marks"".
reboot.

Thanks for looking at this, Eddy1.

I can get into UBUNTU using a live CD, yes, as well as edit any of the boot elements. Os-prober returns this:
/dev/sda1:Microsoft Windows XP Professional:Windows:chain

The first update-grub didn't run, but I followed the suggestions and created a /boot/grub file and then update-grub ran and wrote a menu.lst.

I'm realizing though, after having to think it through more closely because of having someone else look at it, that the big problem is probably that I'm trying to use a non installed live cd to try to fix the problem my attempt at actually installing Linux caused. The live cd will almost always reference the temporary files in the system it creates, not the ones resident on the hard drive. Your reply has been invaluable in getting me out of the frustration and exhaustion of the last two days and actually seeing this.

My next step will be to try to do an actual install using any of the four Linuxes I have install disks for and seeing whether any of them gets around this. Right now, if I can just boot the Windows recovery console, I'll declare victory, get out and do a real Linux install when I've recovered from this.

This mess all happened because I have a highly irrational affection for IBM Thinkpads. I've installed Debian on at least five destktops, with at least three of those being dual boot Windows installs and by now it goes pretty smoothly. I always just allow Windows to rewrite the MBR. When I finally got the courage to try to install Linux into one of my laptops, though, I didn't want to lose any functionality no matter how trivial. I had read that allowing Windows to rewrite the boot record disables the blue Access key (not that I ever even use it, arrgh!) so tried to write the boot record somewhere other than the first partition.

When that failed, I lost access to my Windows system as well, and in an illustration that one should never go all geek and work on these long past the point of frustration and exhaustion, accidentally formatted and so wiped out the Windows partition. I had had the sense to back up a lot of the data, but not enough to make a recovery disk. The recovery partition is still there and thankfully, Ubuntu allows me full access to all files in it, but I can't get grub to recognize it and can't get rid of grub, not even by reformatting all partitions except the recovery one.

Sorry for the long reply - and thanks again for your very useful (and terse!) suggestions.

Lexia

From a liveCD go to sf.net and get the bootinfoscript - run that and post the RESULTS.txt. That way we can see everything about the boot environment (no personal data).

Thanks, syg00, but I've just gone ahead and completely installed Ubuntu on that laptop and left Windoze on the other. So, problem solved (one way or the other).