booting issues

jonnyp11

jonnyp11

New Member
ok, so i was messing with my crappy compaq in my sig and decided to try the win8 dev preview on it. i installed it fine and all, but then when i try to do anything on ie or really anything other than the windows explorer it just craps out and comes up with the error solving program and it never works no matter what. i also have tried the repair tool on it but that was no help. so now i want to go back to xp, and of course i did the custom install just to be safe and put the preview on a completely different hdd too, but somehow now when i try to boot and it goes to the os selection menu, only win8 is on there. i have tried disconnecting each drive seperately and it seems that it overwrote the winxp boot files with its own on the other drive so that the only way to boot is with both drives in. so in an effort to solve this i tried to grab my ubuntu flash drive that i installed ubuntu with in the first place with, and remade the files and all. but of course it's not working and on boot it just says booting from the usb flash drive or whatever, then it has 1 line of words talking about syslinux 3.78. something or something like that and something about the ebios or something and i basically can't do sh*t with the computer at all. so can someone please help me with this :(?
 
You got to learn how to install and uninstall operating systems, else you'll mess up the MBR as it seems you've done. Your 2 options are to either:

Load a new MBR on the XP hard drive

or

Simply re-install XP.

Couldn't tell you how to do the former. I hate messing with boot loaders, so I always save my files to a separate hard drive. That way, I can mess with windows all day and just re-install it if I royally screw it up.
 
yeah, i had planned to use the ubuntu install i planned to do to do the uninstall and all, but it won't work. i looked it up and saw a thing saying you can go to a ubuntu live disk or usb drive or whatever, then go to the command prompt and enter grub and then you do something and it's supposed to fidk this kind of stuff, but again, my ubuntu drive won't work, about to try it on this comp to make sure it is the comp not the drive.
 
jonnyp11 said:
yeah, i had planned to use the ubuntu install i planned to do to do the uninstall and all, but it won't work. i looked it up and saw a thing saying you can go to a ubuntu live disk or usb drive or whatever, then go to the command prompt and enter grub and then you do something and it's supposed to fidk this kind of stuff, but again, my ubuntu drive won't work, about to try it on this comp to make sure it is the comp not the drive.
Click to expand...

Hyren's boot disk has a fix mbr utility on it... maybe this will help. You might also try loading pc dos and just formatting both drives if data loss is not an issue.
 
As I can see,you installed Windows 8 which is still in the development so you can't really expect it to work properly.What's the rush lol...

Anyway you have messed up your MBR completely so the best and easiest way for you is to simply completely format the hard disk drive and then install Windows XP on it again.I am going to skip the KILL DISK method this time to make it easier for you.So do the following:

-open your computer case and unplug ALL the hard disk drives COMPLETELY...
-now plug in ONLY that hard disk drive on which you are planning to install XP on.

NOTE: If the hard disk drive is PATA,you might consider putting the jumpers in their right position to make the HDD as the master one.If you do not know how to do this then simply take ALL the jumpers out,but do NOT,I repeat do NOT plug any other hard disk drives in your computer at all!

-Close the computer case
-Boot from the XP CD-ROM disk (be sure that the boot order in the BIOS is correct)...
-Wait while setup loads the XP data...
-Once you get to the section with the partitions,delete them ALL.After that you will end up with the UNPARTITIONED SPACE.So select that and install Windows on it,by selecting the slow NTFS format called "Format the partition using the NTFS file system"
-Format will start...
-After the format is complete,setup will continue so just follow on-screen directions and that's it...

NOTE: Do not be like one of those who just "click buttons" during the setup before you even read what it says lol :P
I know some people who first put the HDD to format and THEN they read what HDD they put to format and then they realize that they put wrong HDD to format and they lost all their data hahaha!That is exactly what happens when you click before you read :P



Cheers!
 
is there any way to use my recovery disk set (6 disks) to do the reset, really since the win8 is on a different drive i planned to just format it anyways, and if possible would like to install the os on that drive if possible (it's a 60gb and the current os drive is an older 20gb that is fairly loud too). Also i don't have a xp disk, i only have an upgrade disk, i think my dad used our win98 or whatever then upgraded, if that matters. But also i was planning to use the ubuntu installer to do the departitioning while installing, but it just won't work, i guess i'm gunna retry making it with a diferent program. guess i might as well try 11.10, also prob a good idea to use the installer they recomended in the tut.
 
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ok, got ubuntu on there fine on the second (60gb samsung) hdd, but i tried to use the grub thing and downloaded it and all but it can't find any grub files.
 
It is ntldr vs bootmgr. You need the boot sector on the active partition to load ntldr. Fixboot from xp's recovery console can do that.

Note that the problem doesn't lie in the mbr.
 
i'd like them on the same one but i'm fine with them on seperate drives, the samsung is a few years newer so it is a lot quieter and when dl'ing ubuntu i did its benchmark thingy and the 60gb with quieter is also faster too. and larsch, if i can't even get past the bios screen other than a blinking light and a grub error how would i get to the recovery console.

guess i'll go try my recovery disks in a min or 2.
 
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