I did the unthinkable. In a fit of rage i booted my laptop i WinXP and deleted my linux partitions.
Now why did i do that? See the story below
I have been happily running linux on my laptop for quie some time now and i run winxp on vmplayer. vmplayer has been slow but not “irritatingly”. now a couple of weeks back, i noticed the winxp getting to that “irritatingly slow” level. i thought about it. *I* dint do anything that could have slowed it down. Also because of the ACPI issues, the linux usually ran only at 590 MHz for which i did a “echo performance > /etc/sys…..A path i will update later (can be googled easily)
However even with that i dint notice any discernable performance excpet that the windows welcome boot message was now understandable 
earlier when it booted, i could hear every note and it went on like for a screeching 10-12 seconds (im guesstimating here). ok finally this got to me one day and i thought id just do everything from scratch up. Had all the data i required on CD’s.
Into windows and in 2 minutes deleted all my linux partitions, recreated some blank partitions for linux and then remained on windows. i decided id run linux on windows inside the vmplayer and check the performance. *THEN* it hit me……………huh!!!!
there was an enterpirse patch for an antivirus software that was installed on my virtual machine (win xp). now this wasnt there earlier and this software rn 10-12 services which took quite a toll on the processor (i believe).
Anyways, things went on fine that day and i was ready to work on windows fo a while.
Next day, i started my laptop as usual and hey it just came to the grub prompt. Ooops!! i realised, where is the grub.conf?? i deleted that linux partition. I was ill and at home and couldnt boot into any OS to chek out google. So i called on my friend who did the googling.
Well there ar just 4 steps to get into windows from the grub prompt. do this
1) rootnoverify (hd0,0)
2) chainloader +1
3) makeactive
4) boot
and then you are in Windows!!!!!
October 20, 2006 at 12:07 am
Damn, this saved me from some frustration.
I just installed Lunar Linux and it came with a command line grub. Brought up on GUI grub I was lost and only remembered vague details about grubs command line.
Now I’ll boot windows and install a new version of grub =).
November 29, 2006 at 5:43 pm
Thanks, thanks a lot!
I felt lost, frustrated trying how to recover my crashed XP.
Thanks again!!!
fabrizio.carraro@cinecittastudios.it
January 11, 2007 at 6:50 am
unrelated to this, but;
Have you tried the shiny new Ubuntu edgy eft? I saw it being installed on a windows laptop with C: being the whole of the disk. I was worried about not destroying the windows install on it. Using ubuntu’s partition manager, we could just resize the windows drive (ntfs) and install linux. Resizing did not affect windows at all.
February 12, 2007 at 11:24 am
Your blog helped me recover my crashed WinXP/RH Linux system.
Ahmedabad, India
February 12, 2007
April 17, 2007 at 12:58 pm
Thanks a lot Amey… Your suggestion helped me fix my PC..(which i thought was a fit candidate for a reinstall).. thanks again…
September 22, 2007 at 4:32 am
Even though this stuff is dated,
I wanted to point out some problems if windows happens to be
on a USB connected Hard Drive.
in grub.conf, I added the boot
target:
title Windows XP Pro External Disk
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1
Notice that I used (hd1,0)
since (hd0,0) is the linux boot
disk.
So, when I selected this target
from the grub menu, it completely ignored it and it
booted into Linux (Fedora 7).
So, does anyone have any
suggestions?
October 18, 2007 at 4:50 pm
hi i am using redhat linux 9.0, when the server reboot it comes to grub command line. how to enter into the OS .. pls help me.