Recently I remove a second hard drive from my PC that was being used for Dual Boot (Windows XP and Ubuntu). I needed to isolate Ubuntu from Windows on seperate machines. But immediately upon restarting the PC, I was faced with a black screen that told me:
"My PC has crashed" I thought.

During the installation of Ubuntu to make my PC Dual Boot, the MBR was altered to allow the Dual Boot, giving me the OS prompt when I first power up my machine. However, when removing the drive containing Ubuntu, the MBR was seeking for Ubuntu but cannot find it, resulting in a black screen with Error 21 message.

The problem here is with the MBR (Master Boot Record). And this is a solution to repair it.

• Insert your Windows XP CD and restart your computer. Be sure the CD drive is the first boot device.
• When prompted, press any key to boot from CD.
• Select "Repair Windows" (DO NOT select re-install Windows or Install Windows).
• Enter the Recovery Console.
• Type in the Admin password.
• When the Recovery Console is loaded, you'll be at a command prompt (c:\windows). If needed, change directory to c:\ (CD c:\) to the root directory.
• Type FIXMBR
• Follow all the prompts -- (yes, this is what you want).
• Restart. Your Windows is now fixed.

Would this work for any dual boot situation(i.e. I just deleted my partition with ubuntu on it)? I personally do not dual boot, but this might come in handy later when I am going to dual boot with xp and vista. Anyway, this looks like really helpful information for troubleshooting. Thanks for posting it.

This should work for any XP [or prehaps any NT-based] OS. Vista has a different way of recovering though - just boot from your Vista CD and follow the friendly, GUI instructions.

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Ash
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Ok, sounds great. And, btw Ash, how is vista? I was planning on getting an academic version of the home premium upgrade for various reasons. One being halo 2. I just want to know about the installation and the overall experience of vista. TIA

If you've got the resources and the cash, I say go for it [with an XP dual boot]. While it has some intuitive features and looks great, I personally wouldn't purchase it [I got my copy for free from Acer/MS]

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Thanks,
Ash
CF Founder
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Nice. I have a good computer, and I do plan on dual-booting with xp. Partly so I can play games on xp because I don't want performance lose when I can game on xp. And money isn't really a problem because I can get it for $75 because of an academic store.