[KLUG Members] fixing bad mbr on WinXP with linux

[Andrew Thompson]

On Sun, 2005-09-25 at 21:24 -0400, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> >> > > > A friend has a non-booting WinXP computer.  It says the root partition
> >> > > > is unmountable.  He's asking me for a WinXP boot disk, which I can't
> >> > > > find laying around anywhere.
> >> > > > I do have a Knoppix and a Ubuntu CD.  So he could boot to Linux (yea!)
> >> > > > Is there anything he could do with those to restore the master boot
> >> > > > record (MBR), which I assume is the problem?  He doesn't know if it's
> >> > > > fat32 or NTFS.
> >> > > If you can boot from a DOS floppy you used to be able to "fdisk /mbr" to
> >> > > regenerate the master boot record.
> >> > Hmmmm... I can create a boot disk on a local WinXP machine, but it
> >> > doesn't seem to have fdisk...
> >> Yep, you have to copy the fdisk command file to the floppy manually.
> > The HD doesn't have fdisk.  Is it called something else now?
> 
> Bugger.  I just checked an XP box and sure enough there isn't there - I 
> haven't
> done this in a LONG time, so I guess this tip isn't useful anymore.
> 
> The fdisk man page in LINUX doesn't mention the MBR at all.

Have a look at this page, and see if it looks helpful:
http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/Win2kmbr.htm

I was at this site last week, looking to see if I could find a way to
move a bootable win98 installation to a larger partition, and actually
have the system still work. This site gets pretty deep into the
mechanisms of MBRs. I haven't gone over this particular page thoroughly
yet, but you might find something useful there.

-- 
Andrew Thompson <tempes at ameritech.net>
The Imagerie