Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Possibly the most malicious software on the planet. (some exaggeration implied)

Apparently the bootsect.exe is not strong enough to eliminate the contagion that is GRUB. And from what I'm told, doing a flat out reinstall of Windows won't do it either. Neither will any amount of Abolish Poison or Remove Curse. No, I have to boot into Linux again and tell GRUB to GTFO from there. You'd think that with such an open philosophy, Linux would make it easy to switch back to Windows should the desire arise. Well, they don't. They have this certain expectation that their product is better (and maybe it is, but it isn't more useful, not for me.) This expectation that "once you Ubuntu, you'll never adieu." Well they're wrong! And their accursed partition-level boot loader is holding my computer hostage until I can exorcise it from my hard drive.

I like the idea of Linux. Some of the implementation details are screwy though. More on WoW when I can purge my computer of the infection that is GRUB.

4 comments:

Captain The First said...

Ghehehe I know that feeling. Ran Knoppix for a while and redhat before that but there's just too much delta between unix and windows to be able to do without either (ironically you'll go without unix before you'll go without windows).

I resolved to using my unix boxes for various networking tasks and server duties and picked up vista for the 'user' box.

After a few dozen hours of removing everything that's not needed or wanted vista isn't all that horrible after all.

Anonymous said...

What about the format command with the /mbr option. I think that's how I used to do it. I'd be careful with it, but it might help you if you don't want (or can't) go to linux.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/69013

Dessyreqt said...

That might be the way to go. My current plan of action is to boot to Linux using the Ubuntu LiveCD and running the command "sudo install-mbr /dev/hda"

If that doesn't work, then it's on to fdisk /mbr. Failing that, I'll just have to get a really strong magnet or something.

Unknown said...

It sounds like the boot sector of your hard drive isn't pointing at your windows partition.

Yes, fdisk with /mbr may do it, though you need to be careful. You want to make a new boot sector (master boot record), but you do not want to re-format your windows partition.

Alternately, maybe the windows install disk has a "repair" mode.