Hi,

I have a laptop with two os running in it, Windows XP & RHEL5. Accidentally, we have deleted the windows entry in grub.conf file. Later we connected the hard disk of laptop to another system & deleted the linux partitions from the disk management tool of windows.

Now the issue is, the laptop is not booting & it is going in minimum command option. The worst thing is, even the cd rom is not functioning properly to format it.

Any suggestion is appreciated.

Amol.

could you, using a different machine again, connect the hard drive of the laptop, disconnect the local drive from that machine, and boot from CD and do an fdisk /mbr on the laptop drive, and then try to boot windows?

How about booting from an USB stick / drive ...?

What do you mean by "it is going in minimum command option"? Are you booting up into an operating system?

What do you mean by "the cdrom is not functioning properly"? You should be able to set the BIOS to boot from the CDROM irrespective on the condition of the hard disk partitions or filesystems.

"it is going in minimum command option" means it was showing grub prompt where by pressing tab key, it shows only limited commandscan be issued.

"the cdrom is not functioning properly" -- probably the data cable of that cdrom is not working and I could not find any other compatible data cable.

We did connect the hard drive of laptop to another system & formatted it with win xp by using the cd drive of that system. It was successfully formatted, however when we connect the hard drive to laptop, it rebooting. We tried in all possible ways to boot windows, like safe mode, safe mode with networking, last known good configurations, but in vein.

Any more suggestions please?

Amol.

It is probably a driver issue from using a Windows installation from another machine. Go into your BIOS on the laptop with the problems and make sure that your cd drive is before your hard drive in your boot order and then reinstall whatever OS you wish to run on it.

Yes, you cannot install XP on a machine other than the one it is intended to go to, barring some sort of PE environment or ghost like features. What you can do, however, is fdisk and format the partitions, and then copy the install directory to the drive. If you can boot from a floppy drive or other device, or even sys from the CD to the C: drive, you can then install XP from the drive itself.