here's the deal. I had windows XP installed on my master hard drive and i got a hold of an old 14 gb hard drive. I hooked up the second drive no problem and loaded linux ubuntu on it. I got tired of linux so in windows i went to the partition menu in contol panel-administrative tools-computer management and deleted the partition for linux there. i went to reboot and now all i get is a black error screen saying GRUB Error 21. I can do nothing, it won't read XP disketts. I need a way to erase my hard drive completely by using the DOS screen. is it possible?
you won't need to erase your harddrive. all you have to do is get windows to rewrite the MBR so it loads winxp instead of trying to load linux.
first make sure the computer is set so that it boots up from CD-ROM (done in bios).
using the XP disk, load the XP installation software. at this point, it will give you the options to install, repair or quit.
What you want to do is to Repair Windows. More specifically, what you want is to Repair Windows using Recovery Console. I think you usually press 'R' for this (forget haven't done it in a while)
you should get a screen similar to this one EDIT: Pic update
from here, all you do is select your Windows installation, usually option 1, enter your password, and you will load into the Recovery Console prompt.
from here there are two commands you need to preform.
type (without quotes) "FIXMBR.exe" (any warnings it give's you just press Y) and press enter.
then type "FIXBOOT.exe" (and again ignore any warnings) and press enter.
after that, take the XP disk out and restart the computer. I've had Linux scuff up the XP boot many-a-times before, and the instructions I have given you have always helped me.
