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> but it never fails to boot, Except when it does. I have a friend who got a virus that deleted the Windows bootloader / ntldr from C:, but hes not as technica
by zanny 12y ago
> but it never fails to boot,
Except when it does. I have a friend who got a virus that deleted the Windows bootloader / ntldr from C:, but hes not as technically literate and lives two states away.
Nothing can fix it. He does not have the technical wherewithal to remove the drive and recover files, there is no way to rewrite those specific files without reformatting the disk, and if the Windows install CD does not fix it (and it did not) you have no resources to try to resolve it.
With Linux, he would have had a live USB on hand, and if it failed to boot he could have reinstalled over his root partition and have all his personal files preserved while effectively resetting the environment.
- tonyarkles 12y agoThis is way OT, and I'm pretty rusty in Windows land, but there used to be a tool you could run if you booted to a command prompt from a windows install disc that would rewrite ntldr and the boot sector. bootmgr.exe maybe? Something like that. Not all hope is lost!
- zanny 12y agoThe context is that he is tech illiterate. So much so that I tried to get him to just use a gui tool on his windows notebook to put Ubuntu on a 2GB flash drive to save his files but he couldn't do it. There is no way he would have been able to boot to the Windows recovery CD command prompt and run anything. Also, I'm pretty sure the boot repair on the disk runs bootmgr repair options during its "please wait were doing stuff and not telling you what is going on" phase.