Booting Error

steviec

I was installing a new hard drive in a computer last night which was to replace the old hard drive and have windows installed on it. So I put in the drive, booted from the old one, and installed windows on the new one from there. I think that may have been where I messed up because it seems it left the pc booting from the old hard drive, where it gave you a little menu to select one of your two installations of XP.

Anyway, installation complete, windows running great off the new drive, all drivers installed. So I remove the old drive and connect up the old data drive(which has always been there) and make sure master-slave settings are all in order. I then turn on the PC and I just get 'Grub - Error 22'

Now the new drive that I'd installed has had both Windows and Linux on it before, but I would have assumed deleting everything on the drive aswell as completely removing the linux partitions and then going on to install Windows XP would have gotten rid of grub? I didn't format the drive because there's data on it I want to keep, but I deleted literally everything apart from 3 folders.

Any suggestions? Booting from the windows CD and entering the recovery console I typed bootcfg /list which showed there was nothing, then bootcfg /add allowed me to add C:/windows after scanning and finding it, so bootcfg /list then listed that so I thought I'd fixed the problem but rebooting gave me the same grub error. It was late at that stage so I just went to bed and in work this morning so it might be something obvious I'm missing

Chalk

sounds like the master boot record still exists on the drive.

if you have something like partition magic you should be able to reset the mbr on the drive so that it just goes for windows.

steviec

Would fixmbr in the windows recovery console fix that up? I typed it but got all kinds of warning messages about how the hard drive as an abnormal master boot record and doing this may destroy all data so then I didn't go ahead and do it...

I don't have partition magic nor do I have a bootable install of windows to run it from without swapping hard drives in and out again which is kind of awkward...

Chalk

im not sure,
i avoid using the repair tools on the wondows disc as in my experience they take too long and fail too often.

ive recently had trouble with hard drive and the hirens boot disc saved my shiny metal ass completely.

have a look for it and you can use one of the tools on there to repair your drive.

Dempsey

The old drive is marked as the active partition, you need to go into disc management and mark the new hdd as the active partition for it to be the booted drive

steviec

Is that hiren's CD freeware? I found it's website but it just listed everything on it without actually giving a download link or anything.

stevenmu

fixboot and fixmbr will only take seconds, I can't gaurentee you won't lose data from your drive though seeing as you have Grub installed.

angelofdeath

fixmbr, like stevenmu said will work, you won't lose any data, only the ability to boot into linux, but you've already deleted that, and as said, make sure the new drive is set active

steviec

Ok so run fixmbr... And then does fixboot set the partition as active or is there anything else on the XP CD to do that?

angelofdeath

do you have partition magic? set it active with that, not sure if theres a way to do it from the recovery console

stevenmu

steviec wrote:

Ok so run fixmbr... And then does fixboot set the partition as active or is there anything else on the XP CD to do that?

I think there is something but I can't remember what. The easy way is to use a boot disk with fdisk on it, any of the "super" boot disks should have or you can make your own if you've access to a windows 95/98 pc, just put in a disk, open a dos prompt and type in "format/q/u/s a:" (this'll format the disk so backup anything important on it) then copy fdisk from the c:\windows\command folder. When you boot off the disk just run fdisk and one of the options is to set active partition.