I just moved into college at CMU. I want to dump Suse and migrate to CMU's in-house "Andrew Linux." First, though, I want to restore the the mbr on my Windows drive. Normally, I would use the Recovery Console and the fixmbr command; however, I left my Windows XP install disc at home. Can I restore the mbr in some other way? Possibly in a way not supported by Microsoft? or Can I install GRUB or LILO to work with Windows XP rather than Linux? Thus, replacing the Windows bootloader entirely, but allowing me to remove my Linux drive and still boot at all. Thank You

Yes; both Grub and LILO can be made to boot Windows. That is, after all, how you dual-boot a machine. There's nothing saying that Grub or LILO need to boot Linux at all -- just make Windows be the only option.

If you want a non-Microsoft way to install the MBR, then if you have a second Windows install, you can boot off a Linux rescue CD, "dd" the first block (512 bytes) off that machine onto a floppy, then boot the second machine, SAVE YOUR PARTITION TABLE, "dd" the old boot record into the new machine, then RESTORE THE PARTITION TABLE before rebooting.

For closure, the only way I could resolve this was by having my folks mail the install disc to me.

What I meant by "getting LILO or GRUB to work with Windows XP" was installing it in such a manner as to be completely independent of Linux: configurable entirely through Windows. But I guess they were never designed for that.

BootMagic probably would have worked to replace the mbr, but I didn't know I owned it until after I got my install disc in the mail.

If you can get a recovery console up, then fixmbr should work?

or you can use a run-from-cd linux distro, like knoppix or slax to manage grub config.

Tom#