Boot Manager....

[johnnybee]

This is a bit of an annoyance rather than anything serious, so no pressure!!
You may remember that I installed Linux Mint on a separate partition on this PC, and while I was using it, everything was fine.
However, for on reason or another I stopped using Mint for a while and then forgot the password, so even if I wanted to access it, I couldn't.
So, on account of the fact that the windows audio would never work, and the fact that I wanted rid of the Linux presence on the boot menu, I uninstalled linux from the secondary partition, reformatted that and the other two partitions and reloaded Win7 back onto the C drive.
On reboot, I found I still had the Windows/Linux choice on the boot manager screen - the very thing I wanted rid of - and going into the boot section of msconfig, found only Windows reference.
I'm well aware that Windows studiously avoids any reference to Linux in any way, shape or form, but I would have thought that uninstalling it and reformatting the partition it was on, would have the desired effect - apparently not.
Anyone got any ideas on how to resolve this problem?

[johnnybee]

Any ideas - anyone?

[Lynnrose]

This is a job for....Mikkh

[mikkh]

Linux and Windows use different parts of the MBR, there are several options to recover from this and the easiest is using 'EasyBCD'

neosmart.net/EasyBCD/ You need to register to get the free version

Or you could use the official Microsoft way using the install DVD

support.microsoft.com/kb/927392

(press the + to get command line switches and more info on using the 'bootrec' command)

[johnnybee]

Ta, Mikk - did the job admirably!
Good little app that one; so many things you can change with it, so in my case it was four clicks, and all done.
Now booting time is back to 25 seconds or thereabouts so now I'll have to make my tea before I sit down to the keyboard!

[alexham36]

May I wade in on Johnnybee's thread and ask a related question.

The reason why I have installed Linux onto a separate physical HD, whilst the other HDs are unplugged, is to avoid the MBR being over-written and the system defaulting to Linux. The BIOS will not allow a SATA HD to be used for boot up if a IDE HD is present, but I can over-ride it by holding down F8 whilst BIOS is running. But that option gives me a choice of HD, Floppy or CD, but not a partition on a HD.

So, if I install PCLinuxOS on a 50GB partition on SATA HD (where Win7 is) and keep the IDE HD (WinXP) unplugged during installation, Linux will write MBR on SATA drive -? If I then reconnect the IDE HD, the system will default to WinXP when my wife is using the computer and I can hold F8 to select SATA HD and make my choice from the Boot Manage Screen.

Is my reasoning correct, or will I bugger up the whole system?

Thanks for your patience and indulgence.

Alex

[mikkh]

As I told you before, I don't use multi hard drives, so I've never come across that problem myself. The logic sounds fine though.

In the long term you need to familiarise yourself with the Linux bootloader, it's a fairly simple task to make Windows the default on an already installed system and you can do it from the install in PClinuxOS (and most other Linux distros)

After you've said no to a Grub password (or yes if your paranoid) it should show a list of OS's with PClinuxOS as the default. Click the Windows entry press edit or modify (can't remember off the top of my head - modify I think) and there's a box to tick 'make default' or similar.

If you look at your other thread 'how do I install without losing data' you'll see I posted a few screenshots of the latest full monty desktop (but altered to be straight KDE) and on that screenshot you'll see I have XP SP3 running in a virtual machine. If your wife insists on running XP, that is the way to do it for enhanced security over the flimsy straight XP. You could do that in Windows 7 too via 'virtualbox' in both cases.

Microsoft do supply 'XP mode' options but it utilises the old 2007 virtual PC software and is only available to Ultimate, Professional and Enterprise versions of Windows 7, so virtualbox is a better option.