chameleon68

Okay, I'm VERY new to Freespire and fairly new to Linux. I have 2 hard drives on my system. The C: drive (20 GB) is storage and the D: drive (120 GB) has 3 partitions. The first partition has XP(70+ GB), the second is a swap (100 MB) that Fedora set up and the third (40+ GB) is now Freespire. I have my BIOS set up to boot into the D drive so I'd assumed until installing Freespire that the MBR was on my D drive.

When I installed Freespire, it gave me a menu that I haven't been able to get back to that gave me a choice of installing Brub on my C drive or D drive. The interesting part is that it had MBR listed as being on the C drive so that's where I put it and just figured I'd been wrong about it's location. The boot order also got changed back to booting to C first. I changed that in my BIOS hoping that it would fix things, but no such luck. I tried uninstalling Freespire and that didn't help. I tried installing Fedora and that didn't help. I tried installing Freespire and that didn't help, but at least I figured out how to access my old files. Most of my files are backed up on an external hard drive that I can't write to using Freespire. I'm sure I can fix that later, but for now I'd just like to be able to boot into either XP or Freespire. Any ideas on how I can find my missing MBR and fix Brub to dual boot?

I also tried just reinstalling XP, but for some strange reason it always tells me I don't have enough space to do that. The only way that's possible is if it's trying to install itself on the smallest partition and even then I would think it would work.

techieMoe

Freespire (and its ancestors Linspire and Lindows) has traditionally had this nasty habit of overwriting the Master Boot Record, sometimes every time it boots. You can restore your XP boot record by booting with your XP install CD, going to a Recovery Console, and typing FIXMBR. It won't fix your dual-boot, but it will at least get your XP back.

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TechieMoe's Tech Rants

chameleon68

That would work, if I had a bootable copy of XP (don't ask). I have to use a floppy to boot into DOS and then go to the drive with my XP disk and run the setup command that way.If you know the command I can use to get into the recovery console, then I can try that. If not, I guess I'll have to find a copy of XP to borrow. Thanks for the advice though. At least I know how to get things back up again even if I don't have the means to do it right this very second

devils casper

boot up from Floppy and execute this




Casper

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chameleon68

I tried fdisk /mbr and it put an option for XP in my brub. When I chose XP, all I get is a black screen with the blinking DOS cursor at the top. It won't let me type anything and it won't go into XP.

Could the MBR have jumped from one hard drive to the other or just changed where it looks for XP so it's looking for XP on my C drive instead of the D drive where XP really is?

Honestly, I'm not stupid! I'm just very confused at this point.

devils casper

MBR is not jumping anywhere. its first sector of Harddisk and contains Boot Loader and Partition Table. you storage disk ( C: ) is connected as Primary Master and fdisk /mbr rewrite MBR of Primary Master only.

unplug your first Harddisk and plug-in Second having XP as Primary Master. boot from Floppy again and execute 'fdisk /mbr'.






Casper

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cheesecake42

we should have a windows forum under the distros catagory lol

devils casper

i dot think so. MBR is rewritten coz of GRUB and Windows Forums can't provide you solution for removing GRUB.





Casper

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cheesecake42

i was just joking there just seems to be a lot of windows knowledge floating around the forums as well.