Desperate help needed! MBR problem

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Hello,

I recently installed suse 10.1 on my machine to dual boot with windows xp using grub.

The opensuse 10.1 was very basic with minimal changes. Linux and XP were both installed on the same hard drive on separate partitions. XP had 20G for itself and 3 for swap while suse had 130G and 3G.

However, after buying a new machine I decided to make it opensuse only and my older machine xp only. So I tried to uninstall suse (referring to these pages: http://tr.opensuse.org/SDB:How_to_Uninstall_Linux and http://tr.opensuse.org/SDB:Uninstalling_the_Boot_Manager_GRUB_from_the_MBR). But neither the changes in YaST2 or fixmbr on the Windows XP recovery console changed anything.

I came to the conclusion that the MBR was being re-written before rebooting and therefore it was still booting into GRUB. So I deleted the linux partitions (from windows) and made them into one NTFS partition for windows. There was now 3 partitions XP system, swap and the new empty NTFS partition.

On reboot (accidental - knocked the power cable loose - i don't reboot often) I received 'Disk Boot Failure: Please insert ...' as I (half) expected and once again went into the XP recovery console and used the fixmbr command. Unfortunately this still made no changes and I cannot boot into windows. I've been trying to fix this all day to no avail. The worst thing is that I have many (non-backed-up photos) and my new resume (again not-backed-up yet).

Things I have tried:
*fdisk /mbr - (apparently the same as the fixmbr command) however /mbr switch does not exist.

*Active Data Recovery UNDELETE - It cannot read the disk at 80h and I can't make any further changes. But using another program that was on the Active Data Recovery boot CD I found that the partition table was still intact and could view the files on each partition on the hard drive.

*Magic Boot Disk - I had created one a few months back and had used it a couple of times for simple things but now when it comes down to really being needed the disk decides to stop working.

*DiskPatch - says that there is nothing wrong with the boot sectors on the partitions? and the mbr is ok.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

Grant.

PS. The annoying thing is that I don't have a floppy drive on the laptop to create a boot disk from only a DVD burner.
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Relevant Pages

  • Re: *** STOP: (0x0000007B,0XF85438D0,0XC000009C,0X00000000,0x00000
    ... To start the Recovery Console, start the computer from the Windows XP CD-Rom ... and fixmbr for limited disk repairs. ... | Dave I could not create a boot disk at home, but I had created one at work ...
    (microsoft.public.win2000.general)
  • Re: CHKDSK repeatedly runs.
    ... How do I change the registry so this doesn't keep happening? ... There are times when the disk checking utility needs to ... run before you boot into Windows. ... I have a two year old laptop running Windows XP. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
  • Re: New HDD Installation
    ... while your installation is up and running use the Disk Management tool and make sure that you have a properly identified System Partition and that it is marked as "Active". ... If it is so identified and marked and still won't boot then do both commands as Ron suggested. ... Description of the Windows XP Recovery Console ... It would take awhile but I am willing to start fresh if it gets the new HDD in and the small out. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: Start Up Error Messages
    ... That hangs around for c 20 seconds and then the boot ... Go a head and remove and run disk clean up and see if the check disk will ... How To Schedule Tasks in Windows XP ... Under General Tab clear your History, ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics)
  • Re: Moving beyond "Tutorial: Building and Deploying a Run-Time Ima
    ... try running TAP.exe under Windows 98 to ... missing a critical boot device, ... > I did partition/format the disk in the development PC using NTFS. ... drive while it was in the target PC and "it" works fine. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.embedded)