L99 Help

[crewandrew]

I have a 60GB harddrive in my laptop. I tried to install Mandrake (Linux OS) in a seperate partition to dual boot. I was never able to get the mandrake to work (i'm thinking its my graphics card), so I decided to get rid of it and use the drive for storage. I went ahead and simply deleted the three logical partitions, and reformatted this free space into one new drive (yes, i know now that this was not the best course of action). It used to be when I booted up that a blue box would pop-up, where I could pick from linux, safe something, and windows (I believe). Now when I boot I get a black screen with something along the lines of "L99 99 99 99 99" and so on. I have the XP discs (OEM discs that I bought and installed). The harddrive has a main windows partition, the linux partitions (now a one storage partition), a primary storage partition (for a total of two storage partitions), and a FAT32 for swapping from linux.

I have looked into using FIXMBR from the recovery section of the XP disc, but it says that "Caution. This computer appears to have a non-standard or invalid master boot record. FIXMBR may damage your partition if you proceed. This could cause all the patitions on the current hard drisk to become inaccessible. If you are not having problems accessing your drive, do not continue. Are you sure you want to write a new MBR?" Needless to say I don't want to lose my other partitions...

Ideas? Help? Thanks to all.

[crewandrew]

i just did "fixmbr /device0/harddrive0/partition1" which is the partition with windows installed. this did nothing.

then i did simply "fixmbr" which supposedly did it on "/device0/harddrive0/partition0". now i get the message "invalid partition table"

[trackrat]

Try this.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/talk/node/135

[crewandrew]

Try this.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/talk/node/135

thanks for the try, but i had already been there and it doesn't seem to apply to what I'm doing. I want to get back to the windows bootloader (as if I had never installed linux). If I'm missing something that is there, maybe someone can point it out to me. Thanks.

if it makes any difference, when I did the "map" command from the recovery console, it gives me my drives, but has changed some drive letters (i never looked at it before from recovery console, but i know what i had setup before). My harddisks used to be C,E,F,G with my DVD-drive as D: and a virtual drive at H. Now my harddisks are C,D,E,F, with the DVD at G, and the virtual at H (or there about---the harddisks certainly have been relettered). I don't know if this is relevant, but if it is, I don't know how to change the letters back to normal without running windows. I also ran a Knoppix Live CD and it won't let me mount the first partition with windows. The other partitions are fine. Furthermore, running CHKDSK from the recovery console says that there is some problem.

[mark2]

I found the same problem at one point after removing a linux bootloader, however I then ran fixboot before running fixmbr and the problem was cured

[crewandrew]

I found the same problem at one point after removing a linux bootloader, however I then ran fixboot before running fixmbr and the problem was cured

GENIUS! My new found friend, whoever you are, I thank you very much. I went back and did FIXBOOT and then FIXMBR, and the computer booted right up. Much appreciated!