[HOW TO] Get back your Windows XP Bootloader

[navin.rai]

Hey all, I just registered to the site to say thank you, you helped me a whole bunch!

I just downloaded a copy of Vista off the web, followed the live CD through till it said Repair Your Computer, went to Command Prompt and typed "Bootrec.exe /FixMbr" and hit enter! Now it works again.

I LOVE YOU!!!

[stylemessiah]

Again i draw your attention to my earlier post: HERE

After reading the continued postings about fixing the mbr via windows repair etc, i can only come to the conclusion that some people like to head butt brick walls and other immovable objects in their spare time, even after being given a solution that doesnt destroy the mbr in the first place...........seriously, why do you lot persist to do things the hard way? The human gene pool is doomed going on the evidence supplied here.

[virgo89]

Does this also work for;

Grub Loading Stage 1.5

Grub Loading please wait....

Error 21

[Dewey Sasser]

For what it's worth, I don't have a Windows install CD that works, either (short form: Thinkpad T61p was pre-installed and XP appears to need drivers for hard drive). I'm perfectly happy with grub, but Truecrypt wasn't.

So, I moved grub to my Linux boot partition then needed to recover the NT boot loader (which I zorched long ago when installing Ubuntu).

I installed a new Windows under VMWare (from an MSDN CD), then booted that VM in a linux rescue CD and extracted the first 446 bytes of the drive (dd if=/dev/sda of=ntboot.mbr count=1 bs=446).

I then put that into my target machine (dd if=ntboot.mbr of=/dev/sda) and the NT boot loader was back. I presume that this worked because in both the real and VM cases I was booting from the first partition (/dev/sda1 in Linuxspeak).

For completeness, to make the machine keep booting linux I extracted the boot record from my boot partition (dd if=/dev/sda6 of=linux.mbr count=1 bs=512) and set boot.ini to load that file.

Truecrypt is now happy and I now have an encrypted Windows boot drive and can still boot Windows and Linux with the drive available (Truecrypt FTW!). Now to encrypt the Linux drive...

[Growled Member]

I'm a bit surprised this post hasn't been kept up to date. For Windows 7 do this:

Boot from the Windows 7 CD

Choose Repair

Choose Command Prompt

Type this in the command prompt:

bootsect /nt60 c: /mbr

This gets rid of grub and replaces it with the Window 7 bootloader.

[keysteele]

I'm a bit surprised this post hasn't been kept up to date. For Windows 7 do this:

Boot from the Windows 7 CD

Choose Repair

Choose Command Prompt

Type this in the command prompt:

bootsect /nt60 c: /mbr

This gets rid of grub and replaces it with the Window 7 bootloader.

I just tried this and nothing happened still stuck with the grub

[Syanide]

EDIT: WTH, won't post the link...

Try this.