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Ok can someone plzzz help me, i have 2 hard drives one with xp(40gig) on and another spare(old 5 gig one) so as i have been toying with the idea of switching to linux i decided to install lycoris on my spare drive which was set as master. Everything went ok and when it asked for me to check any partition or whole drive i checked the whole drive and the installation went just fine onto my spare drive.
I then shut down linux and unplug my spare drive and turn on my system again only to find that the lycrosis start screen has come up and NO xp but instead of loading linux up it just gives some errors.
However if i hook the other drive back up then linux installs just fine.....i dont know if i am right here as i am not that knowledgeable in linux but the linux OS seeems to be on my spare drive (as it should be) however for some reason the Grub loader is been installed on my XP drive and now i cannot get back into it.
I dont particuallry care that XP may be dusted just that on this drive there is a file i would hope i can retrieve somehow anyhow dont care.
Can someone plz tell me what has gone wrong and any way of getting into drive again as even in dos my XP drive says it is unreadable and i get an error code.
What i would also like to know is how can i get rid of the Grub loader as i have tried ..fdisk /mbr and this is not working.Thankyou for any help you may be to me.
mbr is overwritten.
if you have not formatted xp partition then xp can be restored and it will live happily with linux.
do let me know your options and i'll try to help you out.
best wishes.
ash
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no no i have not formatted the xp partition.
Ash, what do you mean by mbr is overwritten?
Like i have said i just want to get back into the Xp drive to remove files before i trash the drive and install Linux only onto it.
I was told that as XP is still there all i need to do is remove the Grub> installer and then that would allow the pc to boot into XP but this has not worked it is still there.(using fdisk method)
This was the only suggestion from the lycoris web site i got, if you have any other ideas as to what i can do please share.thnx
tk.
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"mbr" means master boot record which resides at the starting sector of disk. when you installed linux, grub which is a bootloader got written in the mbr where originally ntldr(boot loader of xp) was written.
there are many ways to handle this situation. i understand you are interested in multi-booting xp and linux.
well, go to http://www.linuxdownloads.org/minihowto/Multiboot-with-GRUB.html#ss2.3
you can use grub to multi-boot xp and linux.hope this will help you.
if you have any confusion, feel free to post follow up.
best wishes
ash
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If you just want to recover your file and
dump XP altogether, try loading XP from the
CD till the first phase. This will
overwrite the mbr where grub currently
resides. Your boot.ini should be intact, so
once the first phase of XP installation is
over, the other boot files for XP will be
written to the mbr and you will be able to
start XP normally. once you backup the
required files, you can do your linux
installation.
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Thankyou Ash for your suggestion, but the hard drive i am trying to get the grub loader off has only XP on it as i said the actual linux files were all installed onto a seperate master drive but somehow the grub files were installed to my XP drive which i had temporarily set a slave in order to do my linux installation.
This may come in handy however as if i decide not go all linux just yet (i am new to it) i could still keep a copy of XP as a dual boot,so thnx again.I am a little confused Kevin, i dont have the CD on me at the moment and will have to wait to do this but if you are aware of the steps involved could you please just point them out to me for now.
Do you mean to do a repair of my XP installation by booting from the CD,and will this replace the mbr,thnx for your suggestion.
Lastly do any of you know and i may be wrong here if i can just overwrite the grub loader using a Boot disc other than using the A:Fdisk /mbr method, as that is not working for me.
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kevin is right.
since you have already run fdisk /mbr , so it wont help. you can use ranish from http://www.ranish.com/part/ to chage mbr.
RTFM ranish.
best wishes.
ash
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I am unable to load into XP with my CD, also Ash i used the prog you reccomended and according to it, my Linux partitions have been recognized however it says that the rest of the drive is empty which i guess means that somehoe when i orinally installed Linux it DID in fact wipe this drive. I dont know why or even how it could have done that but well it is done.
Thnx for your help anyway.
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Licoris sux, i had a similar problem where i have xp on a 40gb with a whole pile of partitions now (cause i thought when i was instlalling xp to make them just in case). licoris install asked to use the free space i had and i told it *not* to use its boot loader. well something went astray and it did use its bootloader and not give me xp. on trying to fix this i managed to get 'invalid partition' on bootup and nothing ... lucky the recovery disk from licoris (highly reccomended part of the program - in fact the only part) allowed me to boot xp and from there norton's disk doctor worked out that there were 2 partitions set to boot and rightly so gave licoris the finger. i promptly deleted the licoris partition and am going to try yet another distro. (been through rh7.3, rh 7.limbo whhatever, now thinking of mandrake 9) linux for a newbie is tuff when nothing works.
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