Figment

Please help before I lose what little hair I have left. Sorry it is so long, but I've tried to give as much detail of what/why etc as possible

Basically, I want/need to remove my second hard drive to use in another machine. This drive was partitioned for a data drive for XP Pro (empty) and Mandrake Linux 9.1 The main hard drive has XP Pro, and the bootloader was modified during the Linux install to dual boot.

When I removed the second drive (without doing anything else first) the machine would not reboot (I guess this was because the boot loader was trying to read info from the removed drive). So I replaced it and booted OK.

Then tried to find out how to replace the original MBR, and in so doing inserted the WinXP install disk. On rebooting the system started from the CD and immediately went into installing WindowsXP mode, as if there was an incomplete installation. It is presently sitting on the Installing Windows stage, with an estimated 39 minutes remaining but won't go any further - although the splash screen changes every 30 seconds or so to tell me how wonderful XP is.

Remove the CD and reboot and I still get the dual boot loader options, but if I choose Windows, it wants to continue the installation and asks for the CD. I DON'T WANT IT TO INSTALL, I ALREADY HAVE/HAD A PERFECTLY GOOD INSTALL.

Is there anything I can do to get my single booting install of Windows back without having to go through the entire XP installation - which would put me back to pre SP1






Thanks for reading

stevencotton

Icky So when you choose to boot from Windows, it boots ok but asks for the install CD? If so that sounds dodgy to me - like it's already installed part of XP and overwritten what was there

Was it 'fdisk /mbr' you used to recreate the master boot record? Normally I'd assume you'd not get a grub/lilo boot loader after doing that.

Steve.

Figment

Couldn't run fdisk /mbr, so ended up using recovery console and fixmbr, which got rid of the bootloader screen, but my problems didn't end there.

From what it appears to want to do, there must be an old incomplete installation of XP which has somehow come to the surface. Ran thru the install (had no other option) then it rebooted and gave me a stop error.

eventually got it started again, went straight back into the install phase, but now is running slower than my old 286 machine

Looks like I'm going to have to get into the drive somehow and get all the important data off (that I copied across from the second drive earlier today - bummer) then go for the full monty re-install

Cheers Mr Gates - really helpful [img]images/smilies/mad.gif[/img]

stevencotton

What filesystem did you use on that Windows partition? You may be able to mount the disk from a Linux boot floppy.

Figment

NTFS

No real experience with Linux (only installed recently, and install did not complete properly, hence the other reason for wanting to remove it.


I'm currently in the middle of installing XP on a spare hard drive, and hope to be able to put my original disk in temporarily as a slave to get the data off. Is there anything I need to do, other than setting the drive as slave or cable select?

stevencotton

No, that should be enough. Good luck

Figment

Cheers, will update later

Figment

Update

All data successfully recoved - thanks to all who helped/suggested remedies. Now installing several trogobytes of MS updates to get the PC back to somewhere near where it was 24 hours ago. Then just need to reinstall progs etc *sigh*

Drive that wouldn't play is now in a spare machine, and is happily accepting a fresh install of XP Pro without hassle.

Another one to put down to experience.