View Single Post
  #24  
Old April 28th 10, 06:17 PM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.newusers
Twayne[_3_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,073
Default How to clone Windows XP back to your HD?


In ,
Carl typed:
On Apr 24, 9:50 am, Carl wrote:
On Apr 21, 2:59 pm, "Tim Meddick"
wrote:



Carl, I am so sorry to hear of your continued problems.


However, I am truly heartened by your tenacity in getting
the USB Recovery Console fully working for yourself.


One thing - because you logged on to C:\WINDOWS you know
your XP partition is still there, along with all your
personal data!


The next thing I would have advised, would be to start-up
your PC with a Win98 floppy boot-disk. I would then have
instructed you to type the command FDISK - which would
list any partitions that still exist on the boot device.
If the XP partition still existed you could make it
bootable.


But, as we are talking about a Netbook, this won't be
possible.


BTW - You are getting "GRUB loading" because the
boot-sector (a small hidden section at the start of each
partition) has been taken over by a Linux loading program
written on to it, in place of the Windows boot-sector
loading "program" which searches for NTLDR on C:\


The only thing I can then advise is to again, start up
the PC with the bootable USB drive, then type *both*
commands - one after another - without [re]booting
in-between.


FIXMBR C:
FIXBOOT C:


...then reboot. This has worked for me in the past.
And, if still no joy, reverse the order of the commands.


I do feel quite confident that we will get there in the
end...


==


Cheers, Tim Meddick, Peckham, London. :-)


Tim -

Many thanks for your patience and perservance on this
problem.

I am away from my Netbook, visiting family in South
Carolina for a few days, but will follow your instructins
when I return home, early next week.

I'll report on the results.

Carl.


Hi Tim -

Back home. Started the netbook with the Windows Recovery
flash drive.

At the prompt typed FIXMBR C; and hit Enter
No text appeared, it simply brought me back to the prompt
and I
entered FIXBOOT C:
It returned, roughly;
Target partition is C:
Sure you want to write a new bootsector to the partition?
Entered Y
It returned, File system is NTFS, FIXBOOT writing a new
bootsector,
then, Successfully written.

At the prompt, I typed Exit and the netbook restarted and
since the
flash drive was still in, it booted up from it.

I shut down by holding down the on/off button and when it
restarted, I
was back to
RUB loading.
error: no such partition
grub rescue

I then reversed the order of the commands: FIXBOOT C
first, FIXMBR
second.
Again, FIXBOOT successfully wrote a new bootsector and
FIXMBR did not
return any message.
Typed EXIT, held down the f2 key, reordered the boot order
putting the
Samsung IDE HDD first, and exited saving that configuration.
Again got
GRUB loading.
error: no such partition
grub rescue


I wrote in this much detail as the thought occurred that
perhaps I was
doing something wrong AFTER running the FIXMBR and FIXBOOT
commands.

Am I?

As usual, many thanks.

Carl


Carl,

I haven't been following this thread, but here's my 2 ¢ anyway:

You probably need to be doing those things from a bootable CD. Otherwise,
fixMBR etc is going to write an entry for the current operating system which
seems to be Ubuntu? . Same with fixboot/bootfix (I can never remember which
it is). If you wanted it to be writing them for XP, and XP were the
operating system you booted into on the hard drive, then the separate boot
CD wouldn't be necessary.
So, read up on fixmbr and fixboot, get a bootable CD/DVD, and go from
there to be certain. Load windows from your bootable CD/DVD, use the Command
Console and run fixmbr and fixboot that way. Otherwise they won't be writing
data for XP and it'll fail.
I think there are ways to tell fixmbr et al what to write, but I don't
know what they are. Your research might uncover that when you read up on
them.

HTH,

Twayne`


Ads