I don’t want to admit that I still have PC’s that dual boot Windows XP and Vista, but given the occasional problems I have after Ubuntu and Fedora updates I’m not ready to give them up yet. Some time in the middle of the night last night my laptop, which used to dual boot Ubuntu and Vista (before I deleted the Ubuntu partition), rebooted and left me with a ginormous GRUB loader error:

GRUB Loading stage 1.5

GRUB loading, please wait...
Error 15

The issue is that the boot loader probably went apeshit and doesn’t know what to do.  Since Windows is the MBR nazi, it’s best to use Windows to fix it.

Luckily with all the luck I’ve had with Vista I still had the install CD and was able to recover quickly. For those of you at home, if you don’t have the original install CD you need to create a boot disk and slide it in <insert giggle here>. From the CD, when the menu comes up hit ‘R’ for recovery console which will bring you into the Windows command line. If you’re using the boot disk, you should already be there.

From the command line type ‘fixmbr‘ (or fdisk /mbr for versions < XP) and then you should be able to successfully boot into Windows XP (or Linux).

If you’re still running Linux on dual boot, another option is to run the recovery from the Ubuntu CD.  However, this can take a lot of time and if you don’t know what you’re doing you may end up deleting your OS.