- Since I have joined this forum I got very interested in Grub4Dos, and since then I have read up on all the bells and whistles about this great universal boot loader.
- Well since I am in the entry stages of Computer Repair down here in southern Florida where most folks don't really have a clue on how to do Preventive Maintenance on their computers they bring it to us at your local computer repair shop.
- To make a long story short I came across 3 systems that needed a complete factory image restore.
- I cant tell you how frustrating it is to keep on seeing a manufacturers splash screen and no recovery options listed at the bottom or within the BIOS setup. Countless efforts of Google searching trying to locate combination keys to hit prior to P.O.S.T (Power On Self Test) to activate and jump into the Hard Drive recovery mode.
- Well with no help from those numerous resources I tried I thought of an alternative and it lead me to my Grub4Dos USB stick. I remembered reading in depth within the tutorial about chain-loading from the command line for trial and error. Well I thank God that it came in handy for these systems that had severely damaged file systems.
- So in conclusion if you have identified that your hard drive or someone else's hard drive has the recovery partition still intact. Try to chain load the PBS (partition boot sector) or OS boot loader or whatever it might be called inside that specific recovery partition. Hopefully you will have the same type of luck I had. Good Luck!
- Below are the steps I took on each system to access these recovery partitions still intact on the HD.
- Keep in mind that all 3 Systems were Windows based OS's (XP, Vista, and Win7) yeah ironic isn't it? LOL!
~ RESULTS MIGHT VARY ~
1. Type the command
root (and hit the [TAB] key which will show you the list of possible drives on the host system.
2. Once I saw the possible drives I retyped the command
root (and added one of the possible drives it listed previously. Like for example it might list
or something like that so before I hit the [TAB] key again it looked like this(hd0, hd1, or hd2)
after hitting the [TAB] key and the comma should populate to the right. Then after hitting the [TAB] key again the second time, some partitons will populate right below and it will inform you of the file systems on that specific drive and which partition is set to active. Now keep in mind if you select a drive and hit the [TAB] key twice, and nothing populates then you should assume that the initial drive only has one partition. Those were the steps I took to verify which drive was holding the recovery partition.root (hd1
3. Next step was to identify the OS so I know which boot loader to chainload it was going to be either NTLDR or BOOTMGR I think. Your situation might be different of course.
4. So once I identified the bootloader to chainload along with identifying the partition that held the recovery image for that specific OS, then I set root to that partition typing this command
root (hd1,0)and hitting the [ENTER] key. Now your working directory is root within that recovery image partition you selected.
5. You can type a
lscommand and hit [ENTER] to get a listing of all the file contents inside of the root. Its helpful to do this cause you might want to double check if you see the bootloader (NTLDR, BOOTMGR) your looking for.
6. If it is not in the root you might need to go into one of the folders in the root where its sitting at and chainload it from there. Which actually wont be hard at all, just type the same command and add the forward slash. Say for example the folder was BootLand, then it would be typed like this
root (hd1,0)/BootLandand hit the [ENTER] key. Now you would be inside the folder of BootLand and still on the partition where the recovery image is at. If you want to check and see if the specific bootloader your looking for is in this folder then type the
lscommand again that's all.
7. If you did locate your bootloader now all you have to do is chainload the bootloader while your in that specific directory. Just type for example
chainloader /NTLDRor
chainloader /BOOTMGRand you should get a response from our friend Grub4Dos telling you that it will boot your specific bootloader of course.
8. Now if you have done everything properly as listed above you should be able to type
bootand hit the [ENTER] key and successfully crank up the recovery manager for that host system to restore the factory image.
I hope this helps the community is someway or fashion, the steps in this procedure might be known to all the members and guests in the community already but if it's not then hopefully it will supply aid for those in need.
Any feedback is greatly appreciated if I did not fully elaborate in certain areas of this guide. I apologize about being a novice to this area of discussion. Hopefully in the future I get up to par with the rest of the community.
~JUST_A_NOVICE~