Well it seems this time it was a big screw up since nobody has
been able to provide a good answer :(. I took some time away
today and analysed away from my dead laptop and came to the
following conclusions:
a) The MBR is ok, LILO is there and I see its prompt when I
boot from the hard disk. It offers me the possibility to
boot Linux and boot WinXP (/dev/hda3). The first works,
the second doesn't.
b) Linux works because I can boot it (obvious huh?)
c) WinXP doesn't work because I cannot boot it.
d) It was the BOOT RECORD of the Windows XP partition (/dev/hda3) that got screwed. That's the one that got
overritten by GRUB. GRUB got installed there and overwrote
the WinXP bootsector. That explains why when I select WinXP
I got the Grub graphical screen yet again.
So. Having analysed that I decided to try a lot of different
things, as obviously FDISK /MBR wouldn't solve my problem
because the problem isn't with the MBR. I managed to get
GRUB out of it with the Windows recovery console but typical
of DOS/Windows disk utilities, it does a poor job at it and
did not manage to fully restore the boot sector. So now
when I select "Windows XP" instead of GRUB I get "Booting
WinXP" followed by the dreaded "Disk Error".
The question remains.... is there a way from within Linux
to restore a DOS/Windows (FAT32!!!) boot record to its
default, kind of FDISK /MBR but for a partition rather than
the master boot record???
All my job search data is there, if I can't get that going
is good by WinXP activation, good bye Office XP activation
and good bye emails and precious data.
If anybody has any idea on how to restore a non-MBR (and non-Linux, therefore Win32/FAT32) boot sector to a default or
original, PLEASE let me know.
e) I can read the data from Windows using Linux but if I
reformat that partition I lose a lot (activation blues).
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