The L 99 99 99... (forever) error

I had India/Pakistan'd my hard disk a while back in order to run both Linux and Windows on my IBM thinkpad. A few days back, I had to take Linux down and so I formatted that part of the partition to give myself 10GB. But the mistake was not removing LILO out. So, what happened was that when the system boots, it stills asks me what OS I want to boot into even though Linux was zapped. I didn't worry about it until today, when I got the L 99 error while rebooting.

Its a simple problem to fix. Just get your (or anyone's) Windows XP CD and pop it in. While booting, get into the installation CD and enter setup mode. Choose the recovery option from the list. This leads you to the command prompt where you are asked which windows partition you want to login to. You will also be asked the administrator password. After entering the password and getting over the God-like-feeling that washes over you once get root access, type in "fixmbr" without the quotes. A disclaimer screen comes up warning you that this probably might damage your disk and make you regret reading this damn post for the rest of your life. While you are hovering your finger over the keyboard and drowning in fear like any other mortal would do, click on the key "y" and hit the "Enter"/"Return" key.

Ta da! This hopefully fixes your problem. Type in "exit" to reboot.