Boot Problems - Very Strange

[makaveli-dave]

Hey there.

I have been searching the net for help on this and im hoping that I will have some luck from the nice people here

My laptop has 2 harddrives. One had Windows XP MCE and the was just for media storage etc. Last night something stupid went through my brain and I thought it would be great if I installed Ubuntu to the 2nd harddrive and dual booted.
Ubuntu installed then installed its dual boot program GRUB. GRUB changes the master boot record from windows to its own thingy where you can choose between Linux and Windows.

Heres the thing, GRUB went bad... gives an error on startup and wont go any further. At this point I am cursing Linux and just want rid of it so I can go back to Win XP and live happily ever after.

Heres where things get wierd tho. I thought that booting from my Win XP cd, going into the recovery console and "fixmbr" or something would repair the master boot record with windows own again and that would be the end of it. Not so.

So I try to boot from Win XP CD. It says to click any key to boot from cd, so i do that. it then says something about checking the hardware then it stops. Nothing more happens. I know from using it on other systems in the past that it should be loading drivers etc then allowing a reformat/reinstall or recovery console but I get nowhere near that.

Right now im really not sure what to do. There isnt a floppy drive so I cannot get as far as reformatting or anything like that. Anybody have any idea why it wouldnt boot from the windows cd?

 

[copasetic]

Get into the BIOS and disable "Legacy USB Mouse/Keyboard" if it's an option. Also disable "Halt on keyboard error" or something like that.

If that doesn't fix it then traces of the Linux install on the second hard drive (are you sure it's not a second partition on a single drive?) are causing the setup program to hang. In a desktop you could just unplug the drive with Linux on it and plug it in again while setup is loading drivers, but in a laptop you don't have many options. You'll probably have to wipe the partition with Linux (you'd have to do that anyway), which means you'll need some kind of reformatting tool boot disc (like Partition Magic) to remove and reformat the partition. After that Windows should recognize it again and everything should go smooth.

 

[arkadi]

try 2 check your xp media on other pc...it usualy the simple staff that works