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I had RHEL 5 and WinXP on dual-boot and then from WinXP I deleted those partitions which were allocated to RHEL. Now I am not able to start my computer. The booting process stops at grub. I tried installing XP again so that it repairs the MBR for XP but the bootable CD is not initiating the installation process. How can I recover my winXP?

Edit : I will not mind formatting the drive where XP is installed (in my case it's in C drive).

Problem solved : Thank you guys for your help and support. I tried the RHEL cd and then in the command mode I tried fdisk -l and it showed that 1 partition was being used by Linux. I deleted that and then booted through WinXP CD and followed the steps which zypher suggested and it worked.

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I'm kinda confused, you are willing to reinstall XP, but are not ready to format the drive where it is installed? Were you able to reinstall XP? – phunehehe Nov 2 '10 at 15:11
Did I say I will mind? Check again. – Chankey Pathak Nov 2 '10 at 16:20
Urgh sorry, I missed the "mind". Anyway it's good that you have your answer :) – phunehehe Nov 2 '10 at 16:42

1 Answer

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If you boot to your windows installation CD, you should see an option called "repair console" or something similar. Select that, it will bring up a dos prompt. Type the following commands:

fixboot then fixmbr and reboot, you should be good after that unless there is something wrong with your windows install.

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I tried that but when I boot from windows CD. A message comes which says Setup is checking the hardware and then it stops responding. – Chankey Pathak Nov 2 '10 at 15:04
@Chankey generally that means either a hardware issue, or there is something wrong w/ the install media. – Zypher Nov 2 '10 at 15:06
Media is correct, no problem with that. Hardware was working good too, just before I deleted those partitions. – Chankey Pathak Nov 2 '10 at 15:07
@chankey i ment that there is something physically wrong with the media. Can you boot to something like an ubuntu live cd? – Zypher Nov 2 '10 at 15:09

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