I did this by mistake after dual-booting Fedora 2 on a friend's computer, and it wouldn't boot WinXP. Turned out I just needed to change a BIOS option. :(
Jonathan
Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
Hi all,
A friend's XP system needs rescuing. When it boots, a message comes up right away "No operating system found". Since I use Linux, he asked me to help restore the system.
The first thing I did was mount the hard drive on my Linux box and I made a complete image of his C and D drives. He's using NTFS.
I now have images of his entire hard drive, so now I'm trying to rescue the system. I don't know much about Windows, so I'm a little lost, but I assume the problem is either:
1. MBR got corrupted * Could be a virus * More likely, it has something to do with software he was installing at the time. He was trying to use Norton something-or-other which wanted to be rebooted into DOS mode. That's when things went south.
2. Missing system files * autoexec.bat, config.sys and msdos.sys are all empty * maybe some other crucial file is missing. I'm not familiar with Windows. I thought there should be something named C:\command.com, but it appears to be missing.
Did some Google searching. Apparently, the Windows XP disk has a rescue console, and it sounds like it does exactly what I need: rewrite the MBR and install a few crucial system files. Unfortunately, (fortunately?) I've never had the need for XP, and don't have it. I really don't want to buy a copy, either.
Apparently, there's a DOS utility called SYS, and doing:
SYS C:
is supposed to restore some crucial boot up files, but when I boot a DOS disk, it doesn't seem to know about the hard drive. I take this to mean that DOS doesn't know how to access NTFS.
I'm still Googling, but I figured I'd throw this out in case someone here is knowledgable about this kind of thing.
Any ideas on how to rescue the MBR without a Windows XP disk?
Pete
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