Locked out my own OS - Panic Time

I've been playing around with OS' today and have pretty much managed to lock myself out of Windows. Before you tell me to stop messing around with this kind of stuff, believe me - I've learned my lesson now. Anyway, Windows is stored on a partition on my HD currently, but the Bootup Sequence, I assume, just isn't going to that partition and booting me into Windows XP. What I'm trying to do is boot into DOS somehow, get to the 'fdisk' utility and somehow set the Windows partition to the primary one. This should solve the problem, although I haven't used fdisk before and I could be wrong. My PC, however, doesn't have a Floppy Drive; I do have a USB flash drive though, and I believe it's possible to boot off one of those. Can anyone explain in ****ie-friendly language how I would go about doing this? Is fdisk the right thing to use? I really, really don't want to have to reformat and lose all my GCSE coursework.

The quicker the answer the better. Thanks

#370988

You should boot of a CD that allows you to use the fdisk tool. Knoppix or BG-Rescue Linux for example is a good solution. Maybe it also works if you boot off your Windows XP CD to the repair console.

#370992

This is a very very extreme procedure (use it only when you got no choice left), but if theres nothign left to do, just reinstall windows on top of the damaged one, at least in that way you wont loose any data, or try to re-upgrade to Windows XP

#371044

This is a very very extreme procedure (use it only when you got no choice left), but if theres nothign left to do, just reinstall windows on top of the damaged one, at least in that way you wont loose any data, or try to re-upgrade to Windows XP

True, but upgrading can affect performance and it might prevent you from running or installing some programs. I'm just speaking from experience.

#371143

Using your Install CD, boot into the Recovery Console. You should be able to use the bootcfg command to fix things. Also check out the fixboot command. (Be careful with fixboot... it could make things worse).

#371168

Do you have more than one Harddrive on your PC? Have you recently swapped out, or removed one of the harddrives?

#371201

if your using grub then you probably just need to edit the name of the hdd which it expects to find windows on..

#371759