Removing grub, reverting to XP bootloader gone wrong

[CrashCore]

I used to dual-boot XP and Fedora. I didn't use the wonderful method to make linux boot from the windows bootloader like I have in the past because I either couldn't find a guide or couldn't get it to work. Either way, I opted to let Fedora's installer just set up grub for me, and it booted both OS's fine.

A year or two ago, I decided I needed the HDD space more than I needed desktop linux, so I removed Fedora (which was on a separate HDD than XP). When I first installed Fedora, I had to resize the NTFS partition and make a 100MB partition for grub on XP's drive. When I removed Fedora, I didn't mess with grub's partition because it was only 100MB. However, grub remained the default bootloader, and I eventually (yesterday) got annoyed with the wait for it to boot the only OS I still had installed (XP). So I just used XP's disk manager to delete grub's 100MB partition and make my NTFS partition active, thinking it would use XP's bootloader by default then. After a restart, all I got was grub's limited bash shell.

At this point, I turned to my usual fix-all solution: Knoppix. I used qtparted to properly set my NTFS partition as active (XP apparently didn't get the job done), and I thought I might as well make the 100MB partition FAT16 while I was there. That worked fine as well.

I'll note that at this point, the NTFS partition was still readable.

Reboot: same thing as before. Here, I used one of my XP CD's in recovery mode to run fixmbr. It gave me a menacing warning, so I decided to just try fixboot instead. Reboot: same grub/bash deal. But in Knoppix and qtparted, the NTFS partition was now shown as red and was unmountable. And in XP recovery, C: was no longer accessible. I then found this thread, which seemed to tell me that using fixmbr would be OK. So this time I did fixmbr (success) then fixboot (said it fixed an error, success). Reboot: no grub, "A disk read error occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart."

Again in Knoppix, qtparted showed the partition table as the same. The FAT16 partition can be mounted, read; it's fine. When I try to mount the NTFS partition, Knoppix throws this error (attached picture). Obviously I should have at least done a full backup while the disk was still readable, but alas, it's too late now. I also attached a screenshot of what the qtparted windows looks like.

Oh, and one last note. I did try to use chkdsk from the XP CD like the error recommends, but chkdsk said something like "unrecoverable errors detected" before even beginning to scan. Sorry for the super-long post. I'd like to get the NTFS partition at least readable if bootable isn't possible. Thanks!

[markwolfe Veteran]

Oh god. You found you were in a hole, so you kept digging. :ermm: :pinch:

When you removed the GRUB boot code that remained and was working, all you had was the 440 bytes in your MBR that pointed to the (now removed) code.

At that point, if you posted here, or googled a bit, you would have seen that you could have thrown in your XP CD and have done a fixmbr to reset those 440 bytes to Microsoft default, giving you what you wanted.

You may have inflicted some damage to your filesystem.

From your knoppix (or other Linux LiveCD) see if you can do a testdisk which will attempt to look at the data sections of your drive and re-create a valid partition table. I have been 1 for 1 on success of this tool. It worked perfectly the one time I used it.

If your LiveCD doesn't contain testdisk by default, see if you can install it within your Live session (apt-get install testdisk).