I hate computers sometimes...

Kiey

I guess I'm just having a bad computer day or something... I'll explain. So earlier this week my two external HDDs fell and are currently not working. Which is a problem since that's where I keep my backups, along with videos and whatnot. Today I decided that I would plug one in directly to the mobo so that I could see if it was still functional or not, or whether why it wasn't working was the external casing. So I made some room on my internal drives in case it worked so I could move stuff over, one of those drives had an ubuntu partition which I formatted.

So I shut down, plug in the drive and turn the computer on. So now instead of loading windows I get a nice error from the Linux boot thing, which I obviously can't do anything about since I can't get into windows, or into the no longer there Linux. I tried repairing windows multiple ways to no avail. I am now here after reinstalling windows again, and still dealing with all the stuff I have to reinstall. And I still don't even know if those hard drives are serviceable.

Along with that I've been thinking of upgrading my system, but after all this I'm just tempted to buy a pre-built system and just throw in the extra parts from this comp into that. I'd rather not have to go through this whole windows reinstall, only to have to install it again on another machine, so I haven't decided yet what I'm going to do.

Omnutia

I hate computers sometimes...

This man is a miracle in positive thinking.

Apreche

Use a Linux LiveCD...

Kiey

Tried to, but it seems as though it would not load for some reason.

Apreche

Tried to, but it seems as though it would not load for some reason.

What does it say?

Kiey

It was saying something about loading something (specific I know,) but don't think I can really repeat the issue now that Windows is back installed, but maybe I'll try one of the live discs tomorrow and see what happens.

am_dragon

The first thing you should do is go into the BIOS and make sure you are not booting to the disk with the Linux partition. You may want to make sure the jumpers on the drives are set correctly as well. You should then be able to boot directly into Windows as you have before.

I don't know what Live CD you tried, grab a couple. The if Ubuntu doesn't work try Fedora, you should be able to boot to a Live CD even if there is no hard drive plugged into the computer.

Kiey

Well my WIndows is on the master HDD, Linux was only selectable through the GRUB boot menu that came up every time the computer started. I'm guessing that when I reformatted the Linux partition that some important GRUB related stuff went with it thus causing that problem.

As for the live CD I tried using both an ubuntu CD, and an opensuse live CD. Both of which gave me the same error.

kiwi_bird

This always helped we when I had grub issues: Link

Omnutia

Your Grub is most likely due to the fact that Windows wipes grub and installs its own boot loader when you install it.

am_dragon

When I read your post it looked like one of the disks you added had a Linux partition. In any case fixboot and/or fixmbr from the Windows recovery console has always worked for me.

I did find a site with an alternate solution. It seems to be highly recommended by other sites.

Kiey

It doesn't matter really anymore, but I figure I should clear this up simply in case someone else stumbles on this and needs the help.
Order of what happened:
1. Reformatted HDD partition with Linux on it in Windows
2. Restarted Windows
3. GRUB errors
4. Try to boot from Linux live cds
5. Live CDs don't boot, but hang on BIOS/console saying its loading
6. Ran Windows recovery/repair off install disc
7. Attempted to Boot recover/fix/default etc. (whatever sounded helpful that was in the boot help text)
8. Reinstalled Windows, and GRUB issue went away.