In a bid to make my old Acer TravelMate 280 more usable for my other family members, I decided to clear away the partitions containing SuSe 9.3 Linux to make more space for Windows (Sorry, Linux).

So I just went bruteforce, deleting all the linux partitions, completely forgetting that GRUB leads to the Linux boot partition. I then rebooted the laptop.

GRUB, obviously, pops out an error, refusing to boot.

I then pop in the Windows XP cd, got to the recovery console. It asked for my adminstrator password, I gave my administrator password. Of course, like all Microsoft products, it will die on you when you most need it. There’s a bug in certain incarnations of XP recovery console. Brilliant, isn’t it? I didn’t know that initially and I thumped every password I know before hurriedly running upstairs to grab my other laptop, thinking of dumping a boot disk into my USB thumbdisk.

Then it struck me that my Acer TravelMate 280 might not be able to boot from a USB thumbdrive. To confirm my fears, I browsed through the BIOS. I shuddered.

XP CD-ROM refused me. The laptop can’t boot from USB. So… I’m left with my floppy.

My Floppy Disk! I then earnestly shook off the layer of dust gathering on my floppy disk. When was the last time I used one? I hope it still works.

Thinking that the tides are with me now, I downloaded the best bootdisks I could find together with some Fix MBR utilities. Time to format a floppy! I felt around my Thinkpad, looking for an indentation indicating a floppy disk drive. No luck. Then it dawned on me that my Thinkpad has no floppy drive.

Cursing myself, I then transferred the compilation into another desktop before producing the floppy. Everything went smoothly from then on. Once booted from floppy, I typed “mbrfix /drive 0 fixmbr”. Rebooted. Windows XP loads. Done. :)

Lessons learnt:

1) Know your partitions. List down what they do, contain and their references (0, 1, 2, 3…)
2) Windows XP recovery may not always work.
3) Always keep a couple of floppy disks around, no matter how uncool they look. Also have one thumbdisk around for transferring stuff.
4) Make a bootdisk containing all essential utilities (fdisk and edit especially). Put one image in your floppy disk and the other in your thumbdisk.
5) Remember that computing is in a state of transiting from floppies to usb thumbdrive/network transfers. Note that, to recover most machines, the only way is to boot from CD or floppy or thumbdisk. Many older machines do not support booting from USB. One might not always have the right CDs to boot from too. Clearly, the floppy still offers the most versatile and universal boot solution, no matter how uncool and slow they are.