pleas help urgent

not to go too off topic but is backing up the whole c drive and restoring it the same as a system restore?

I Don't think so.System restore takes your computer back to a previous time to reverse any harmful changes,whereas to back-up your hard drive is just to make sure that if you loose any data on a computer
it can be easily restored from your chosen choice of back-up method.(CD's, DVD's etc)

No.If you mean Windows System Restore, it restores Windows to the state it was at a previous point in time. This may or may not involve data lossIf you mean a manufacturer suppplied recovery, this restores the entire hard disk to the state it was when it left the factory. this DOES invove data loss.A backup is a copy of data (NOT programs or operating system) on external media, kept in case something goes wrong and data loss occurs.

yet another stuped thing well i did yet another stuped thing, i forgot that grub wont let me boot anything with out being able to detect ubuntu, and i just now deleted the ubuntu partition on my usb hard drive so is there any way to boot in to xp without ubuntu? will reinstalling ubuntu help. and i heard about some usb bootible mbrs do you recomend any, preferably one that wont replace the current mbr?

get a windows XP disk and boot from it. At some point during startup it will give you the option of going into the recovery console. Choose this and log into the windows install, type 'fixmbr'. press enter and confirm when asked. Reboot and you should be able to get back into windows.

i got an iso from the net and it did not have a fix option, it just went to install

Replying to #26

It's part of the install procedure, right at the beginning it will give you the option of pressing 'r' to enter the recovery console. You might have to wait for it to get past all the 'loading files' bit.

oh ok and that will work even though its not the same copy of xp

should do

the recovery aint showing up on the xp disk i have so i guss i will have to try another iso, thanks

do you still have the recovery partition on your PC? if so then just hit F11 (or F10?) when you turn the PC on and it should boot recovery from there. If not then you might just have to do a complete reinstall. When I used the recovery option from my XP pro CD it just tried to recover from the recovery partition (for complete recovery) or tried to boot windows system restore which failed because I didnt have XP installed.

its a school computer so i dont have that option

Replying to #32

in that case just contact the school and plead ignorance, just say you had a power cut and it died, make them fix it lol

i could, but your not sopuse to mess with there stuff like that, might get in to big truble if i dont repair it my self

In all honesty, you shouldn't be playing with stuff like this at all if you lack the knowledge to put it right when things go wrong.

i know sometimes i dont thank things through or i over look things, if push comes to shove i could erase the mbr (the day they com to pick it up) and say a virus did it. of coures thats if they even look at the hard drive i thank they may just wipe the drive and reinstall xp. wont need to mess around with stuff like that now because i now have my own non-limited compter.