Bringing an XP MBR back from the dead
When I installed my laptop at work, I divided the hard drive for a dual boot setup with Windows XP and Redhat EL4. I never actually dual booted since, well, it sucks and I have another RHEL machine I can SSH into anyway.
A couple of weeks ago I ran out of space on the NTFS partition, mostly because 25GB is used storing my MP3 collection. So I needed to wipe the multiple ext3 partitions I created for the RHEL installation and combine them into a single NTFS partition.
I’ve never had to do this under Windows before, but a small amount of Googling led me to a Microsoft support page that describes how to use the XP disk management utility. This utility is really pretty good. Go Redmond! It was very easy to make the changes I needed, and within 10 minutes or less I had a shiny new NTFS partition as my E: drive providing a much-needed 40GB of additional storage.
The only problem was that GRUB was still installed on the MBR, so next time I booted the machine, nothing happened. Disappointing.
I fished out my XP installation CD and tried to do a recovery. I tried various commands, but none of them worked. More Googling led to this comment that describes the command sequence required:
> fixmbr
Using either of these commands seperately doesn’t work, at least not in my situation.
