OK, I installed WinXP and Fedora on my new AMD64 machine and had grub.conf setup for the dual boot. I was able to boot to both Fedora and to Windows.
All of a sudden, I can boot to Fedora but cannot boot to WinXP. When I try to do so, the screen shows:
'Windows XP'
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
Error 13: Invalid or unsupported executable format

Any suggestions for what may have happened and what I can do it fix this?
Thanks for any ideas!

Could you post the contents of your menu.lst file.

Thanks for the quick inquiry!
on my system, /boot/grub/menu.1st ->./grub.conf
so here is grub.conf
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core (2.6.9-1.667)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-1.667 ro root=/dev/md1 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.9-1.667.img
title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1


I have winXP installed on hda1 and hda2 is /boot and FC3 installed on hda3
the partitions on my main drive are as follows:
Device Start End System
/dev/hda1 * 1 2550 NTFS
/dev/hda2 2551 2583 Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hda3 2584 6407 Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hda4 6408 19457 Extended
/dev/hda5 6408 19457 Linux raid autodetect

henderman: There must be more to your story.

For example, linux software raid usually involves more than one hard drive, but you are only showing one disk. How many hard disks are present?

Hopefully this gives a more complete picture:
I have 3 HDs and the setup is as follows:

Primary Master, 160 GB Seagate
Primay Slave, 200 GB Seagate
Secondary Master, DVD Drive
Secondary Slave, 160 GB Seagate

here is my /proc/mdstat

Personalities : [raid1]
md1 : active raid1 hdd3[1] hda3[0]
30716160 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md2 : active raid1 hdd5[1] hda5[0]
104824000 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md0 : active raid1 hdd2[1] hda2[0]
264960 blocks [2/2] [UU]


Disk /dev/hda: 160.0 GB
/dev/hda1 * 1 2550 HPFS/NTFS (this is where windows is installed)
/dev/hda2 2251 2583 Linux raid autodetect (this is /boot)
/dev/hda3 2584 6407 Linux raid autodetect (this is / where FC3 is installed)
/dev/hda4 6408 19457 Extended
/dev/hda5 6408 19457 Linux raid autodetect (an ext3)

Disk /dev/hdd: 160.0 GB
/dev/hdd1 * 1 2550 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hdd2 2251 2583 Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hdd3 2584 6407 Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hdd4 6408 19457 Extended
/dev/hdd5 6408 19457 Linux raid autodetect

Disk /dev/hdb 200.0 GB
/dev/hdb1 * 1 11574 FAT16 (I don't know why it says this b/c its moutned as an ext3)
/dev/hdb2 11575 12096 Linux Swap
/dev/hdb3 12097 24321 W95 FAT32

The one major thing that has happened since I was last in Windows is that my primary disk went down, /dev/hda, and due to the raid I booted off /dev/hdd since the raid1 is mirroring everything but the Windows partition between hda and hdd.
So, I would have booted from /dev/hdd, which doesn't have windows installed since windows is installed on hda1. I rebuilt the raid1 by restoring the disk (for some reason the power supply was not giving it power) by adding hda 3, 5, and 2 back to md1,2,and0 respectively.

Thanks for any suggestions you may have!

My linux software raids tend to be raid0 (except for /boot), so when drives go down, I don’t have to worry about restoring anything. And I recently had the power supply problem happen to an xp system running on a Raid0. The 5V output was too low. Your power supply wouldn’t happen to be an Antec, would it?


Maybe the xp problem has something to do with partition numbering (numerical order) on /dev/hda, new vs. old. Strange things can happen to the numbering when you start deleting/moving/altering the partitions.

Also, have you looked at xp using the recovery console, just to make sure it’s still intact? I think you can run “dos” chkdsk /p to check for damage to NTFS from the recovery console.

If I was in your current situation, I would probably (1) make a grub boot floppy from FC3, (2) run fixmbr from the recovery console and then (3) boot directly into xp, just to make sure that xp still runs. The problem could be with xp.

Then I would boot with the grub boot floppy and run the “find...”, “root...” and “setup...” commands as are described in the Grub manual ( http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html ) to get FC3 running again. In your case, the “find” would be “find /grub/stage1", since you have a separate /boot partition.

If xp still doesn’t boot from grub, then you at least know that xp isn’t causing the problem.

Hey, thanks for that advice, I will have to try those suggestions, although I cannot boot off the winXP disk (see below).

Just to respond to a couple things in your email: yes, I do have an Antec power supply! I didn't seem to have any problems after using a different plug in the power supply. Anytime a drive doesn't work though it will be my first suspect.

There is one more thing that has been very odd about the OS instal. On other machines, I installed RedHat first and on a partition on hda I installed WinXP and then used the rescue shell to go and edit grub for the dual boot. This time, after installing FC3, I tried to boot the Win CD, but it's day "detecting hardware configurations...." and then the screen would go blank and it'd freeze. The only way I could install WinXP this time was to axe FC3, use the FC3 rescue shell to wipe the hds, and then install WinXP on a blank disk! After doing so, I installed FC3 and edited grub and voila I had the dual boot working. Then when the disk went down I couldn't boot to grub. I also am stuck at this same problme of not being able to boot to the WinXP disk - it goes blank screen after "detecting hardware configuration!" So, I have the idea that Windows is being very particular about something.

Off to try your suggestions, and thanks for your help. I will let you know what happens.

henderman: It sounds like you are fighting a windows problem.

1) Two things that can stop windows from booting are a hidden windows partition and a windows partition not marked as bootable. When partitions are being copied/deleted/moved, it is possible to inadvertently hide the partition or remove the bootable flag. Your hda listing seems to indicate that the NTFS partition is bootable (i.e., “*” is present).

Try throwing the kitchen sink at grub/xp one time by modifying grub.conf to include:
...
title Windows XP
unhide (hd0,0)
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
makeactive
boot
...

2) It looks like hda is set as the first bootable drive in BIOS, but do confirm that to be true, since windows is picky about where it starts the boot process from.

3) Think about installing the livna ntfs support (see kernel-module-ntfs-2.6... at http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/3/x86_64/RPMS.stable/ ) so that you can mount the NTFS partition and look at c:\boot.ini to make sure the default boot definition is pointing to the right partition.

WhatHisName:
Thank you so much for your help. The dual boot if finally back up and running. I am ashamed to admit that after all of this, the problem was my own stupidity. When the disk went down, the bios automatically updated and I thought I had it corrected but apparently there are 2 sections for setting the boot priority. In the section which specifies boot devices, I had DVD, Floppy, and then Primary Master. However, in the next section called HardDrives, SecondarySlave was before Primary Master, even though Primary Master was set to be the boot disk after DVD and Floppy. As soon as I changed this ordering, I got right into WinXP and Fedora no problem.
I can't thank you enough for all your help! I learned quite a lot of diagnostic tricks from your suggestions.