David P James declaimed:
Scott Henson wrote:
While playing around with grub a few months ago I must
have over wrote my boot record for win98. Now the isnt
the MBR on hda, this is the boot loader on hda1. Does
anyone know a way to recover this boot record, or am I
going to have to reinstall windows(if this is the only
option its not worth it and Im just going to reformat the
partition.) I would really like to know if there is a way
to restore the Win98 boot loader. Thanks
I did the exact same thing once - but there is a way to recover.
Do you have a Windows boot disk? If so, boot the computer
into DOS with it and at the prompt simply type 'SYS c:\'
(I'm assuming any reasonable DOS boot disk has sys on it).
That will rewrite the boot sector of the C:\ partition with
the DOS/Windows bootloader. Caveat: This was with Win95, not
Win98, but I don't see why it shouldn't still work.
The sys command will install msdos.sys, io.sys, and command.com to the
partition. It will not fix the mbr and it will mess up the win98
install. It's intended to make bootable floppies, if you do it to the C:
drive then the C: drive will only boot into the command prompt & you'll
have to reinstall windows unless you know some tricks.
I recommend, on the basis of 10 yrs QA lab experience:
1. Boot from an ms-dos floppy (e.g., win95/98/Me startup disk) and make
sure the desired partition mounts as the C: drive.
2. Run fdisk and make sure that the C: partition is marked Active.
3. From the dos command prompt, run
fdisk /mbr
This is an undocumented feature of the fdisk utility that
repairs/restores the master boot record to the way microsoft thinks it
should be.
4. Power off & back on, any ms-dos/windows OS installed to drive C:
should boot OK.
HTH, PM