So, yeah, big dumbass over here...

Awhile back, I decided it'd be fun to dual-boot my work laptop with Ubuntu Linux. I had oodles of disk space and had wanted to see how my Dell Precision M60 would run Linux. So, I setup a 10gb parition to install onto, and off I went...

That was several months ago. I've probably booted Ubuntu 5 times since installing, so I decided that I could really use that space now. The bootloader I was using to boot between OS's was installed to the master boot record, so I didn't think it'd be a problem if I just deleted the partition under windows and recreated it. "I just won't select linux from the boot menu!", I thought, stupidly. So, I deleted the partition on Friday and have been hibernating my machine ever since. That is, until this afternoon when the battery ran out. I go to turn the beast back on, and am presented with a lovely error message from grub. As soon as I saw it, I realized that grub gets it's menu information (among, I'm sure, many other things) from the linux parition that I'd recently deleted. Re. tarded.

So, I'm thinking "no problem, I'll just get an XP cd and boot off of it, get to the recovery console, do a quick 'fdisk /mbr' and be done with it". Thankfully, I hit up Strike and Braden, both of which gave me the same suggestion: "dude, don't use fdisk - fixmbr is your friend".

Next, I fire up my lappy with the XP cd, it starts it's install fun and then prompts me to start the recovery console, which I do. It's at this moment that I realize that I don't know the local administrator password (I log onto the domain at work, never locally). Grand.

Strike points me to Nordahl's Password Reset CD, a nifty (linux-based) utility that will rewrite local passwords. Boot off of that, follow the prompts, and my administrator password is now "".

Next, I get back to the recovery console, enter my blank password, type "fixmbr" and reboot. Voila, there's my hibernated windows session.

The moral of the story is this - don't go mucking with your partitions unless you know what you're effing doing.