Ubuntu
grub package

How to get windows to boot again?

Asked by Britlion

Okay, perhaps dual booting a windows vista 64 machine was asking too much :)

I found out that vista has a whole different boot system. It's still completely incompatible with anything else, but it's also incomprehensible to those of us that learned how the boot.ini was structured. *joy*

Anyway, since grub crashes with error 17 no matter what, and nobody had any suggestions on how to fix it (thanks for trying anyway guys), I decided to see about getting my windows vista up and running as the sole OS instead. Perhaps I can try 7.10 when it comes out and see if that's compatible with my hardware.

How do I do this? I booted from the vista dvd, and it said it couldn't detect any problems that might prevent windows from starting. Shows what it knows. So I went into the boot folder and tried "bootsect /NT60 All" which purported to rewrite the MBR on all the drives.

Rebooted, and there's grub with it's error 17 problem again. I thought that overwrote the MBR, where the heck is grub hiding out? How do I get rid of it???

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Britlion (britlion) said : 		#1

I tried

bootsect /nt60 C:
bootsect /nt60 SYS

Which also purported to write a brand new shiny Master boot record. Grub still survives with it's little error 17 problem, poor thing.

So I still have a machine that boots no OS at all, and I can only use with the live CD. And then for no more than a couple of mins at a time before the 60Hz screen flicker gives me a migraine.

*whimper*

Please help?

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Jayson Vaughn (thedonvaughn) said : 		#2

Hello,
Thank you for your question.
I came across this site that explains how to install WIndows bootloader for Vista onto the MBR.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919529

Hope this helps.

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Britlion (britlion) said : 		#3

Aha!

Thanks for the quick response. I found the same page. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually work. It advises me to use the commands I listed above, which do nothing to remove grub.

Grub appears to be rather more indestructible than that!

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Britlion (britlion) said : 		#4

I found a reference to a program called mbrfix which might do what I need. Though given I can't boot any OS, I'm at a loss as to how to run it on the machine, or even if it will work.

I can get it with the live CD, and do...what with it?

I tried putting it on a USB key. I was told I didn't have permission to write to the device, though Ubuntu does see it when I plug it in. I logged in as root. Root also apparently doesn't have permission to write to the device. One assumes it mounts it read only, and I can't imagine why. I tried writing it to one of the NTFS drives. Ubuntu apparently can't write to those either. So I'm stuck on that too.

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Jayson Vaughn (thedonvaughn) said : 		#5

So you can have your machine bootable for the time being:
Check out this link on how to recover your MBR with grub.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RecoveringUbuntuAfterInstallingWindows

To enable NTFS write so you can copy over that program to your Windows partition check out this link (after install Grub):
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MountingWindowsPartitions?action=show&redirect=NTFSReadWrite

Hope this helps!

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Britlion (britlion) said : 		#6

Thanks for the ideas, Jayson.

I actually tried to get grub working again, as per those instructions previously. Here's the output:

sudo grub

 [ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For
         the first word, TAB lists possible command
         completions. Anywhere else TAB lists the possible
         completions of a device/filename. ]

grub> find /ind /boot/grub/stage1

Error 15: File not found

grub>

According to the how-to, grub should respond with something more meaningful in terms of which drive it's on.

I'm in a weird limbo. Grub seems to think there's nothing there. Windows insists it wrote a new MBR - more than once. Nonetheless, when booting the machine all I get is grub error 17....

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Britlion (britlion) said : 		#7

Oh I probably should mention that I opened question 7136 with the grub issues, if anyone wanted to reference that.

I really appreciate that everyone is trying to help. I love the fact that the community wants to get together and help. I feel a bit of a heel for being frustrated to the point of being about ready to buy a new hard drive that's never seen grub, install it, toss the raptor out the window and swear never to look at linux again.

*sigh*

Except, I actually like ubuntu when it's running.

And now my other simpler machine that had ubuntu running nicely for three days shut down nicely last night, and now won't boot. I have no luck with this OS. Time to open a new question on that one, I think.

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Britlion (britlion) said : 		#8

(I fixed the other machine. I left the flash drive in, and it was trying to boot from it. Doh!)

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Jayson Vaughn (thedonvaughn) said : 		#9

Hello,
Ok great so you were able to restore grub and/or your Windows MBR?

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Britlion (britlion) said : 		#10

Nope. That puppy is still down.

I assume there should be a way to get the spare machine to be able to write to the flash drive perhaps? Plugging in that thing, apart from stopping it booting, appears to be read only.

Right now it appears that it is impossible to remove grub using the windows vista CD. I've noted, reading other forums, that removing it by use of older tools like fdisk and bootfix for windows XP doesn't always work either. Apparently it's a case of "your mileage may vary".

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Best Britlion (britlion) said : 		#11

Okay. I went to a friend and borrowed their windows install which allowed me to copy mbrfix and mbrfix64 to a usb key.

I used the windows vista boot cd to boot a recovery console, and got a command prompt.

I ran mbrfix64 (The 32 bit version would not run)

mbrfix /drive 0 /fixmbr /vista /yes

And rebooted directly into windows.

Apparently no linux or microsoft tool can actually delete grub off a hard drive at this phase. Also grub (32 bit ubuntu) is suspect of being able to dual boot a 64 bit vista installation - at least that's how it appeared to me.

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vernsh (vernsh) said : 		#12

I had a similar problem when after installing Vista, there was no mbr on the HD. I found out I could get it to boot if I set the cdrom to boot first and leave the Vista Install disk in. After checking to see if you wanted to run the disk, Vista would start normally. I then determined that I would have to reinstall Vista. However, Vista would not install with Ubuntu present (hmm, conspiracy theory?) so I had to expunge Ubuntu by reformating the separate HD it was on. I could have avoided this by unplugging the power feed to the Ubuntu drive but I didn't think of it at the time. After getting Vista going, I reinstalled Ubuntu. I can do a dual boot of sorts by going into BIOS and setting either the Ubuntu or Vista HD as first. Bottom line, you're going to have to reformat and start over. If you can get Vista to boot with the Install disk in place, save your critical files to another location. I always keep a drive just for backups so you can consider that.