[wellylug] Screwed up laptop :(

[postie]

Jamie Dobbs wrote:

>In trying to install Gentoo on my laptop I have completely borked my
>Windows XP intallation on it (bloody NTFS!) - can anyone suggest an easy
>way to remedy the situation where XP will not boot and gives a 'cannot
>find NTLDR' error.
>I have googled and tried a few suggestions but haven't managed to get it
>working yet. 
>
>
>  
>
Jamie, why blame NTFS for user error? When you installed lilo or grub, 
you probably clobbered the MBR.
You should have installed lilo or grub to the gentoo partition and 
copied the bootstrap record to the Windows
system partition (the one that you boot from) and editted boot.ini.

Anyway, have a look at this.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/reskit/prkd_tro_evwd.asp

One way to get out of this problem is to boot from the XP install disk 
and use the recovery
options to rebuild the MBR. That should fix it assuming that you haven't 
also clobbered the NTFS partition itself.

Another option is to change lilo or grub to chainload the XP partition, 
but I personally have never done it that way.

Cheers,

Cliff