I are an idiot.

[Xaven]

So, I was dumb and installed Windoze 98 on another HDD of mine. Why'd I even bother if it can only run in 16 colors and 640x480 resolution? So I restarted and plugged my main HDD back in. However, when I rebooted, that stupid System Recovery thing that came with my littered install of XP popped up. And uh, all it does is hum around and soon ask me to pop in its CD (which I don't have and probably haven't seen in 3 years). Do you know why it would be doing this (appearing, instead of booting windoze XP)?

I had figured it might have been the same problem as I had before with GRUB, but running fixmbr on the command console of the XP setup CD didn't help. Wah. I really need to stop messing with these things. Thank you one and all for the consideration. :D

(Editra: Neither fixmbr nor fixboot from the recovery console helped, nor did unplugging the Win98 HDD)

[Renmiri]

Ouch!

I did something similar a while ago and ended up having to buy a new set of Win XP disks and reformatting the darn HD. do you have an original set you can borrow from somewhere ?

[o_O]

For consolidation's sake.

I know the feeling.

I'm pretty sure it would be a bootloader problem, in which case running either fixmbr, fdisk /mbr or fixboot would be what I'd recommend (they are different, but neither work very often ). Does the problem go away if you unplug the 98 drive?

It's unlikely that installing GRUB will help, since GRUB can't actually boot Windows - it just boots the Windows bootloader NTLDR.

If they are IDE drives on the same cable, try reversing the order in which they are plugged.

[Xaven]

Ouch!

I did something similar a while ago and ended up having to buy a new set of Win XP disks and reformatting the darn HD. do you have an original set you can borrow from somewhere ?

I do.

I'm considering giving up now. I guess it couldn't hurt to finally reinstall Windows. This install had a good run. Now to go fetch all 40 gigs of my data and write down every program I have to reinstall. :P

But would that really help? I'm assuming the problem is with the "recovery" partition since it's the one that's angry and imposing itself on me. What's a good way to format an entire drive? ...Partition Magic?

[o_O]

I'm vehemently against recovery partitions. They waste perfectly good drive space and I'd sooner reinstall from scratch than use a bloated recovery partition.

To be honest I'd also rather reinstall Windows than troubleshoot bootloader problems, because the recovery console sucks. I'd just back up stuff onto another drive or partition, format the installation partition and reinstall.

My partitioning tool of choice is cfdisk, but Gparted/Qtparted is good if you want a GUI tool. They'll all be on any Linux live CD.

[Peegee]

Yes and no. Depends on how we're defining recovery partitions. I actually think they are good because they restore you pc to working order without the monotony of installing all the drivers and etc.

However it also restores your pc to factory defaults which isn't very convenient. When I get home I will give you the name of the disk imaging program I use. It stores a very small (mine is about 5-7 gig in size) image of your boot drive and you can just use Bart PE to reimage your hard drive.