Hello All,

My name is Justin. i bought a netbook last year. it is an Acer Aspire One preloaded with Windows XP.
the main reason i bought it was so that i could use it in college (Computer Science Major). Unfortunately, i am no longer taking C.S. as a major, thus, Fedora is ... kinda useless to me.

I read some articles on how to remove linux partitions, and so, as instructed, i deleted the partition with linux in it. then i rebooted, and what i was supposed to do was press F10 and go into the Recovery Console, where i would press r then type fixmbr, and that would bypass/DISABLE GRUB from running.
But, what did happen was completely unexpected. i got a window with a couple informational text about GRUB and a grub command line

grub>

thankfully, i have two laptops and i looked around and found similar problem, but none that match mine in a certain way.
to boot XP, i would have to type

grub> rootnoverify (hd0,1)
grub> makeactive
grub> chainloader +1
grub> boot

only then will XP start. i understand what all this means, ive messed with Fedora and Ubuntu for about a year. i continued to read the posts that i found, and for some reason, when i do access the F10 menu at startup, there is no "Recovery Console" or anything or the like.

i found a way to install the recovery console, but every time that i access it, it just gives my an error and says "press Ctrl + Alt + Del to reboot" which is strange.

so i checked the partitions in Disk Management and there is no hd set as active, and i cant set it to active, and i cant shrink or expand volumes, even though (from deleting Fedora 10 i have 25GB of unallocated space,wierd)

so my main problem is this. EVERY solution that i find requires me to load the XP Recovery Disk.
***Problem***

1) my machine did not come with a recovery disk, but it did come with Acer eRecovery Management, which i used somewhere in the middle of all this mess, and it only formatted the C drive, leaving the D (where Fedora was installed) and the GRUB untouched.

2) its a netbook and i do not have an external CD drive

ive looked into my boot.ini, and it looks like this::

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
c:\CMDCONS\BOOT.DAT="Microsoft Recovery Console" /cmdons


after a second of looking at this, i had to ask "*censored*!?"
i removed the last line with the recovery console, since it didnt work anyways ...
then i looked at the "partition(2)"
but i know for a fact that (hd0,0) is the backup drive, and the (hd0,1) should be winXP

so i tried putting 1 for both parts, and my netbook gave me an error saying that there is *basically* nothing in the specified hd partition.

all i really want to know is how to disable GRUB, and set "active" to my hd0,1

i thought this through, and i could actually REinstall Fedora, log in as the root, and disable grub from showing up, set XP as the main, then possibly DELETE fedora again (hopefully having no grub problems)
but i feel that this is time consuming and not necessary. if someone could help me access the "r" option in a properly working Recovery Console, all i would have to do is type in "fixmbr" and that would take care of the grub, but then i have the problem of setting the partition to active (which for some reason the highlight isnt accessable (for some reason???) but i can make the empty partition an active drive, which does absolutely nothing. i could just live my life typing :

grub> rootnoverify (hd0,1)
grub> makeactive
grub> chainloader +1
grub> boot

every single time i boot up, but i am already getting tired of it

someone PLEASE help me.
ps. sry this is kinda long, i tried to tell everything i did to speed up things alittlehere is a recovery console iso you can try:

http://www.thecomputerparamedic.com/files/rc.iso

The Windows boot.ini was correct and you had no need to change it. The first partition on your hard drive is called partition one in the Windows system.thanks for the fast replies guys. i am downloading the iso right now

and @ Geek-9pm

i figured that it was correct after nothing booted. i was just curious because i looked up what the original file should look like and i just COPIED it That Boot.ini indicates that the first partition is a recovery partition and the second is the XP system. But XP can still call itself the C: drive if it wants to.
(It is a registry thing.)Quote from: BC_Programmer on January 01, 2010, 09:12:56 AM

here is a recovery console iso you can try:

http://www.thecomputerparamedic.com/files/rc.iso

That Boot.ini indicates that the first partition is a recovery partition and the second is the XP system. But XP can still call itself the C: drive if it wants to.
(It is a registry thing.)

is there a way to set a partition to active other than using Disk Management? i think that that is one of the main problems

I've only used the ISO on CD-R discs.