Linux Mint Forums

I'll try to explain this the best I can, I have a windows xp machine and added an extra harddrive and installed linux mint on it as a dual boot. I would now like to pull that extra harddrive out and put it into its own computer but when I do my xp machine will no longer boot. Is there anyway to fix this to boot into xp directly again? Please help, it would make my day.

Thank you.

Sure.

Boot from your Windows XP Home/Pro/MCE CD.

Where is says "Press enter to install windows", press "R" to jump to the recovery console.

Now, i recommend to do the following. If you're administrator account has a password, you'll need to type it in.

Run fixmbr . It'll issue a warning that it could corrupt your harddisk, but usually you'll be right. Follow the prompts and when finished, type fixboot . Fix boot will rewrite windows xp loader code, and then type exit to reboot. Don't boot from CD, and XP should be resurectted from the dead.

Coburn64,

The above should work for you, but if it doesn't you can try the below in a terminal.

sudo su

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=446 count=1

Close the terminal. This will erase the boot loader. If the boot area of the MBR contains nothing the BIOS will boot the first bootable partition it comes to on the drive. I am assuming this will be your Windows partition located on sda.

Fred

YAO - Yet Another Option

If you don't have the WinXP install disk you need to download an old windows boot disk: http://www.allbootdisks.com/download/iso.html

Download the Win95b.bootdisk.iso
Burn it to a CD
Then you can use the fdisk /mbr command.

Don't be concerned about it being a Win95 bootdisk, you could also use the DOS 6.22 bootdisk for this.

Thanks guys, very helpful, very quick too, this is the best forum.

I'll try later today.