Windows Won't Boot

[novacaine98]

On my hard drive I used to have Windows XP Professional and Red Hat 9 installed. The drive was divided up into multiple partitions. I decided that I didn't want Red Hat anymore because I never used it. I booted up partition magic and deleted the linux partitions. I then created new partitions and merged them together. I then set my ntfs partition with windows xp on it to active. Now my partitions look like this:

Type SizeMB UsedMB UnusedMB Status Pri/Log
NTFS 38468.1 12455.0 26013.1 Active Primary
Extended 200004.5 200004.5 0.0 None Primary
NTFS 141604.2 98042.0 43562.2 None Logical
FAT32 58400.4 28.6 58371.8 None Logical


Now when I boot up the computer I get this screen:

GRUB version 0.93 (640K lower/1046996K upper memory)

[Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For the first word, TAB lists possible command completions. Anywhere elses TAB lits the possible completions of a device/filename.]

grub>_

How can I fix this? I don't care if I have to reinstall windows but I have some data on the NTFS drive that is 141604.2 MB in sized and don't want to lose that.

 

[KSoD]

Well you can try to re-install windows and see if that data is still there and not corrupt. That is why i feel so strongly about Backing up data. Situations like this can be avoided by just a simple backup. Just my opinion though.

 

[Skuzzle]

put in your xp disc

boot it up but select repair via recovery consol.

You just need to repair the boot sector as its stil looking for the grub boot options screen.

when it the command prompt in recovery mode type help /?

will give you a list of available commands.

Just run anything that looks boot related

Should fix it.. i believe the command you want is fixmbr but not 100% on that without having the disc booted up infront of me.

 

[KSoD]

Repair via recovery console will not always work. I have tried it a few times but to no avail. If revocery console doesnt work then your only other option is to use the Repair option on the Windows XP CD.

 

[BASSMASTER]

I agree with skuzzle, first try the recovery console and type in FIXMBR and just for the heck of it, type in FIXBOOT also.

See if that works.

 

[novacaine98]

Ok I went to symantec's website and went to the support page. I did a search for "boot" under partition magic and found something that said to remove LILO from MBR. I followed the instructions of booting up dos and then typed in the command fdisk /mbr. After doing this I rebooted the computer and received the message "Invalid partition table." I put in my windows xp cd and went to the recovery console. From there I put in the commands fix mbr and fix boot but neither seemed to work. I also tried to use the repair option but it doesn't work either.

 

[EricB]

you should have did FIXMBR first. I did the exact same thing as you did, but I used drive image 7 restore mbr (same thing) tool when my computer wouldn't boot and it fixed my problem