Re: Vista and partion troubles

While you are booted to Windows XP stick the Vista DVD in the drive and then, from a Command Prompt, navigate to the boot folder on the Vista DVD. Then, from that location, issue the following command:

bootsect /nt52 C:

That will return the ntldr boot loader to drive C: If the MBR that you want to change is on another drive change the letter accordingly. For help on the command do:

bootsect /help

John

PS: Possibly the boot folder and bootsect utility are on the hard drive and you can run it from that location instead of from the DVD.


Phazonmutant wrote:

I have a multi-faceted problem it seems...so here is the rundown:

I have a new Gateway laptop with a 100gb sata (I'm pretty sure) hard drive.
I started experimenting with OS's a month or two ago, and started by making a ~25gb partition for Windows Vista RC1. I played around with it for a while, then wiped the partition. This is the cause of my first problem--I still have the Vista bootloader chainloading into the XP bootloader (or the now useless Vista kernel).

Before trying to solve the problem, I foolishly installed a Linux distro (Ubuntu) into that partition (well, I had to also make another partition as the "swap" drive). With it came the GRUB multi-boot bootloader, which successfully recognized Vista's bootloader (note: not XP's), as well as my recovery partition factory installed. However, my Linux installation seems to be screwy (for some reason I don't have sudo power), so I'm going to uninstall Linux. However, I tried wiping the linux partition before, and then GRUB didn't work (its files were on the Linux partition).


So, the meat of my problem now is that I want to get into the Windows Recover Console to use "fixmbr" and "fixboot" (to restore the master boot record to point at Windows and restore XP's boot record, correct?). BUT--when I try to access the recovery console from Vista's bootloader I get the Blue Screen of Death, and when I try to load it from XP's bootloader, the recovery console doesn't load and tells me that "bootmng" can not be found.
Does anyone have any clue as to what the problem is?

Also, does anyone know the files of Vista's bootloader, so I can delete them from my root directory after I get rid of the Vista bootloader?
.

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