Cannot restore MBR on AAO D250 running WinXP

Greetings,

I have an Acer Aspire One, model D250, normally running Windows XP (out of the box).

I rather foolishly tried to dual boot with Ubuntu, as the Live CD seemed to go well and I was interested in what they had come up with in a year's time. Unfortunately, once installed, Ubuntu took a severe disliking to the Broadcom WiFi hardware and refused to boot. Now, for my regular desktop PC at home, I would whip out my CDs, reformat the HD, and install Windows again (and vow never to dabble with other OSes again--for the umpteenth time!).

However, on this netbook I obviously don't have any CDs to install, as I don't have a USB CD drive and thought the backups made by Acer when I fired the thing up for the first time would be sufficient by way of a failsafe.

My plan was to restore the MBR. I had read numerous pages that all described the exact same procedure: enter the BIOS, disable D2D recovery, load PartEDit32, unhide the normally hidden partition, reboot, then copy either mbrdos.exe or mbrwin.exe and the rtmbr.bin file to somewhere on your main drive, install the latter (e.g. mbrwin.exe install rtmbr.win) via the command line interface, reboot, re-enable D2D, and Bob's your uncle!

Unfortunately, I can't find rtmbr.bin anywhere, nor does the hidden paritition appear to possess a copy of mbrdos.exe or mbrwin.exe.

It's frustrating--grub wants to load a Linux OS that doesn't work, so I have to make sure I select Windows XP during start-up BEFORE it launches into infinite "blinking cursor" territory. If I could only restore the MBR, I could load a live USB and remove the Linux partitions (Ubuntu + swap) and have Windows resize itself. But where are these MBR files?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Why not just make WinXP the default for grub? For grub-0.97, the file you need to edit is /boot/grub/menu.lst (not sure what it is in grub-2, as I'm still using the older version)

 

^
The problem was that Ubuntu didn't boot, so I couldn't edit the menu list.

I managed to fix Ubuntu using this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1477490

I have since changed the menu list. Ubuntu runs, and Windows XP is once again the default OS (and there was much rejoicing).