fixmbr and fixboot in Windows XP

Since 2 weeks ago, my Thinkpad dual booting Ubuntu and Windows XP . Today, I pandai-pandai(be smart) went to did some testing on fixmbr to my hard disk. Why I did that because I was thinking to wipe off ubuntu partition so that I have more space to keep porn David Blaine magic shows or whatever it’s.

So, to be frank, I have no idea what is fixmbr, I only spent 10 minutes reading what is mbr and how to make the machine boot into windows without grub. So, I am very smart, boot into Windows Recovery Console and did this;

fixmbr /device/harddisk/partition01

When I rebooted, looks likes bad sign, it still boot with grub, when I selected Windows XP Professional option to boot. It came out this;

Invalid disk (Oh sai(shit)!)

After that, I started to think what’s wrong? What about my data? Is it gone? Then Jef came to our office, I told him I did something on MBR, he said “Oh no… You windows is gone, you can’t play with MBR”. When I heard that, it’s like my soul fallen into 10th courts of hell. So we tried to reinstall FreeBSD(ubuntu can’t boot either) and keep the NTFS drive, tried to make it dual boot and tried to make some tweak on /boot/loader.conf, to see wether it can boot into Windows or not, and the result is — FAILED (now rearch 12th courts of hell).

That time, I started realise how usefull Ubuntu Live CD was. Ubuntu Live CD, you can immediately boot into gnome, use firefox to search for resource on how to recover it. I found fixboot.
And I did this in recovery console;

fixboot

and reboot, and now I am booted into Windows to write this entry. Lesson of the day, don’t try to step into hell’s courts when you are still live in the wonderful world.