The Open Source Journal

Quite some time ago I installed Gentoo on my workstation for dual booting. As part of this process, I replaced the MBR installed by Windows Vista with GRUB. After getting another workstation for Gentoo, I decided to delete the dual-booting Linux partitions and recover the space for Vista to use. Sadly, I didn't stop to think before deleting my GRUB (/boot) partition and resizing my NTFS partition - rendering my system completely unbootable. I had to make the system bootable without rebooting, but how...?

I brought my Vista machine out of hibernation this morning to discover that the physical DVD-RW drive had disappeared from My Computer. In fact, the virtual CD-ROM drive provided by Daemon Tools had disappeared, too. After a typical round of troubleshooting (reboot, check bios, uninstall driver from Device Management and reboot, etc) followed by a brief googling I discovered the solution below.

Your computer should not reboot itself when you aren't there, unless you've asked it to. Few things annoy me more about Windows than when I return to my desktop only to discover a Windows Login box. Almost as annoying as this is that Windows Update pesters you to reboot your computer after applying updates, even while you're working. Nevermind that it steals focus from other windows, interefering with whatever it is you're getting paid to do, the damn thing doesn't have a "NEVER" option to choose from, just "now" and "later"!