Windows XP - Grub "Error 22"?!?

Anyone know what a Grub is other than the critters in the ground? ;)

A long time client brought in a PC that was only a month old from their local church.

Things were not running properly on the system and they wanted us to clean things up.

The system booted into Windows XP with no issues.

We cleaned up the user setup, set security on the user profiles and the Line of Business (LoB) applications, and checked into the partitioning since there were two partitions on the machine with My Documents and their key LoB application moved and installed on the second partition respectively.

When we opened the Computer Management console and checked out the Disk Management console the partitioning was particularly strange.

The OS sat on a small C: partition at the beginning of the drive and the D: partition sat at the end of the drive.

There were two unknown partitions in between. Our client did not know what they were and, given the newness of the system, knew they were not supposed to be there. So, we deleted them, restructured the two partitions to take up the unused space and continued on our way.

When we rebooted the system after some updates though, we found out that there was a little more going on than a goofy partition scheme.

We saw:

Grub 1.5
Error 22
*blinking cursor*

Upon seeing that, the light came on upstairs: Linux.

How Linux was installed on the new machine was a mystery.

How to get our Windows XP back was also a bit of a mystery. A search on the Web brought us to instructions that we already knew: We needed to reset the MBR (Previous blog post).

Once we reset the MBR following the above instructions, we were greeted with the Windows XP boot screen and eventually the OS desktop.

Needless to say, access to that machine will be restricted and monitored from now on!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

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