Thinkpads Forum

my laptop originally came pre-installed with windows XP. i installed Linux Ubuntu on a seperate partition which i created using norton partition magic. i changed the boot sequence in GRUB (to load XP by default)

i recently did a factory restore of my entire harddrive. now the partition that had linux is lost. it dosent show up anywhere on any tools. when i try to start norton paritition magic, it dosent start up (the app fails to load because of this lost partition, i guess). nor do any other partition tools detect this parition.

after some research, i concluded that fixing the Master boot record might fix this problem.

IBM lenovo has a utility on their site to fix the MBR. BUT it needs a floppy drive to work (rips the software to floppy which has to be loaded at boot).

NOW my laptop dont have a floppy drive (rhetorical statement). so has anyone evr tried to do this before? all i find online are incomplete threads on this problem. please help me??!?!?!?!

thanks all.

Can you borrow a Win XP CD?

FIXMBR is a valid command from the recovery console, that being one of the options when booting off the Win XP CD.

Art

Wasn´t it Bootrec.exe/FixMbr

FDISK /MBR

It's a tiny (70K) file from MS-DOS days! Give me your e-mail address via a Private Message (PM) and I'll send it to you as an e-mail attachment. (Note: there are 50 other ways, but none easier.)