Windows Vista Boot Loader
May 30th, 2006
I installed Windows Vista build 5308 and after 14 days, it expired. I couldn’t activate it also. So what is the use of having it and wasting 10gb of precious space? I formatted the drive and restarted my system only to find that the boot loader is a pain in the neck. It just won’t go and refused to give me the default Windows XP boot loader.
Considering the fact that I have 4 OSes 😉 Redhat Fedora Core 3, Windows XP, Windows 2003 and Windows Vista 5308, I have to jump through 3 boot screens to boot into xp, or wait a painfull 70 seconds if it has to be done automatically :((
I popped in the windows xp cd and booted my computer from the CD. I pressed ‘R’ to go to the “Recovery Console”, selected 1 (represents XP on my computer), entered the password for Administrator account and then typed the 2 commands.
1. fixboot
2. fixmbr
After that I typed “exit” to restart.
Voila!! the Windows Vista boot screen is gone :D. Grub is also washed out. But recovering it is not a problem. Now my HDD is happily chugging away releasing 10gb of wasted space. 😀
May 30th, 2006 at 8:57 am
hehe, it pays to have lots of RAM, so I can run stuff on VMWare decently. Like, I installed SUSE in the Same VM as Mandriva, and SUSE trashed Mandriva! Since It was a VM, when I get angry, I can just delete the VM, and all my anger goes away with that. I betcha you can’t do the same with your real sys;)
P.S. How on earth are you goanna get GRUB back ?:-? And, FC 3 ?:O
When’s the Captcha going ?:D
May 30th, 2006 at 9:14 am
Getting back grub is nothing da.. Its a matter of 2 commands. Boot with the first cd of ur linux distro. Go in rescue mode and type the 2 following commands.
chroot /mnt/sysimage
grub-install /hda
Thats it, grub is back 😀
FC3 is also gone now. I will install FC5 over VMware first :). I have 640 mb of ram, which is sufficient to run vista and it did run well. Just that i got bored with it
June 1st, 2006 at 5:27 am
Thats a good info. But you dont have to run fixmbr unless your partition is corrutpt. If you run fixmbr on a good partition, it may get corrupt!
June 2nd, 2006 at 12:16 am
@prathul:
“fixmbr” will remove other boot loaders and install the windows boot loader and its very safe. Absolutely no problems 🙂
June 25th, 2006 at 5:18 am
“fixmbr is perfectly safe” — not unless you made the seperate partitions on your HD while setting up windows or left unpartitioned space on the disk and let linux setup configure it. Using tools like partition magic etc… can make your partition table non-standard according to fixmbr and could corrupt the partition, having a non standard table is not always bad sometimes it means its not windows standard. And also other boot loaders might not store their MBR in the exact same place as fixmbr expects and could cause it to also destroy your partition table or corrupt data
June 25th, 2006 at 12:25 pm
@anon:
fixmbr removes the existing boot loader at MBR and replaces it with the windows boot loader.
If you don’t change your partitions too often, there is a command line tool in the recovery console itself.
Regarding the destruction of partition table and data corruption, i havent faced it till now