boot data is missing/corupted, MBR looks for LILO insted of boot.ini

[UNDERNET]

I had yoper linux running on a partition and wanted to delete it so I did the following.

Used partition magic 8 to>

delete the ext3 partition and swap which made it into free space

Then resized my main partition that holds xp to incorperate the free space that was used by the other partitions.

I restarted my pc and all was fine but after about the 4th restart after 2 days when I filled up some of that free space on my main windows partition (in windows) with some files, xp would not boot.

It just comes up with a blinking underscore sign after the bios check.

I think this is because my Master boot record (or whatever it is) looks for the LILO bootloader that I used when I had yoper linux but it has been overwritten because that area on the disk is part of my main windows partition now.

I remember that when I deleted the yoper linux partition and made it part of my windows partition the LILO boot loader still came up as the data inside my old yoper partiton was not erased it was just marked as free space when I merged it with my windows partition


As a result I cant boot any OS, at this moment in time I just want winows back but I havent a clue on how to fix this problem.
There is nothing wrong with the boot.ini file in windows I dont think, its just that the MASTER BOOT RECORD (or boot volume if thats what its called) looks for LILO insted of my windows boot.ini. I know its targeting the right parition because I only have one parition and it is marked as active.

Any help would be most welcome as im currently stuck on a crappy p2 laptop

Thanks

[Alex Stan]

If you have XP you could try a repair from the WIndows CD.

[techieMoe]

As Alex suggested, you can boot from your XP disc, go to a Recovery Console and type FIXMBR to restore your Master Boot Record to the MS Windows default.