Garsh darnit!
While trying to partition my drives, I don’t know what went wrong.
I totally cleared my second 80gb, so it’s totally un-partitioned. And my windows 20g hd, is un-touched. Now when I boot my comp, it brings up this GRUB thing, where after sometext, displays “grub>”. WTH is this? I tried messing around with CMOS boot settings but never worked. I tried to unplug my 2nd hd, but it didn’t work!
Aw man…
Oh well, I mean all my applications are on cd’s and whatnot, but I had up to 9 gig of photshop psds and jpegs… Argh! Oh well, thanks for your suggestions!
I know this is far too late to help the original poster, but in case anyone wonders, the grub> prompt sounds very much like the boot drive had the GRUB multiboot loader installed on it instead of the Windows default loader. Perhaps your 2nd hard drive (the one you wiped clean to trigger the problem) had Linux installed on it at some point? If so, it’s very possible that GRUB was being used to multiboot the system, and the GRUB boot loader on your boot drive may have been looking on that 2nd drive for the saved boot information. If found, that boot info could have allowed it to boot up Windows for you automatically, which could be why you didn’t notice it until now (if someone else had removed the Linux multiboot before you got your hands on the machine).
EDIT: I just saw an even older thread of yours where you were talking about deleting your Linux partition from that same drive, so I guess there’s very little further doubt about where your problem was.
It’s too late to help you now, but depending upon which version of Windows you had, it probably would have been a fairly simple matter to let Windows overwrite your drive’s boot sector. For example, I had to do this exact same thing (with Grub, even) after I trashed my secondary Linux installation about four months ago. Getting Windows ME to rewrite the boot sector was a single DOS command and about a one second long operation, and everything was happy again thereafter.
Sorry to be bringing help so far after the fact (I only signed up on this forum a few days ago). At least I thought, since someone else might encounter this someday, it would be nicer if they came across the easier solution in this same thread.
I hope your Windows box is continuing to run happily.
Yep, as I recall that would manually boot a normal installation of Windows without removing the Grub loader.
If you’ve gotten rid of Linux and aren’t multibooting anymore, my feeling is that one might as well get rid of the Grub loader as well (so one doesn’t have to type the above every time they boot the computer). Hence my suggestion to have Windows overwrite the MBR with its own default loader.
I couldn’t remember the exact command, so I just looked it up. For Win9x systems, the most common solution to erasing Grub and restoring Windows’ default MBR is simply to start the computer with a boot floppy (which must include the fdisk command) and then run “FDISK /MBR” at the prompt.
Note that I take no responsibility if this ends up causing more problems than it cures, which could be the case if your computers MBR is infected by a virus, or if you have some sort of special hard drive BIOS stored in your MBR (apparently some Maxtor hard drives do this), etc.
I think WinXP has something called FIXMBR in its recovery console that would probably be the preferable fix for that OS, but I don’t have any experience with using it so I can’t say for certain.