Need help to recover my XP partition

[marco07]

Well, I tried everything with no success. Finally, somehow I could manage to boot the windows recovery partition (utilizing the plop) and reinstalled the windows (clean install). Of course before doing that, I copied my files in (My Documents folder) through kubuntu's dolphin and saved the directoy on a usb stick. The main issue with this installation was that I had lost all the updates & upgrades of past few years since recovery installed original winXP SP2. I eventually managed to find a SP3 package by googling and fortunately it worked out fine and now I am happy to be back almost to where the system used to be.
Thanks to everyone for suggestions!

[millusions]

can u see windows partion/files from kubuntu ok?

if so, than as mentioned above, fix the windows grub in other words..
in windows 7 the boot cd does this,
not sure how to go about it with windows xp. i would google something like 'remove grub on windows xp' which essentially would do what you need here and repair windows boot.

good luck

[otisklt]

You may have to pull off the xp repair install to fix it if it can see the xp partition.
This will wipe out grub but that is easy enough to fix after xp is fixed.

[marco07]

testdisk may be able to recover your MBR. Hindsight says you should backup your MBR before and after re-aligning partitions. I wrote a thread on here somewhere that details how to. Is sda3 detected also?

I tried tesdisk with no success. sda3 is a no OS partitition. It contains data file (back-ups) only. I do have a back-up of windows on sda3. However, it could be restored from within the windows OS only.
Thanks!

[oshunluvr]

testdisk may be able to recover your MBR. Hindsight says you should backup your MBR before and after re-aligning partitions. I wrote a thread on here somewhere that details how to. Is sda3 detected also?

[marco07]

Hi Folks:
On my Gateway (DX200s) desktop I have windowsXP on sda1 and windows recovery on sda2 and Kubuntu plus others on sdb. Lately, I modified sda by adding a third ntfs partition to it. Evidently this has messed up the MBR on the sda disk and I can no longer boot into either windows XP or its recovery system. I get the corrupted hal.dll error message. However, I can still boot into kubantu on sdb though.

With no access to XP, is there anyway to fix the MBR on sda?

Thanks!

Edited later:
I did "sudo update-grub" from kubuntu. But it does not detect sda1. It, however, detects sda2, but running it produces the hal.dll error as well.