About two weeks ago I unevenfully shrunk my Win ME partition (using parted) to make way for Linux, and proceeded to install RH9. My disk layout is now:
/dev/hda1 Win ME (+-30GB)
/dev/hda2 /boot (+-100MB)
/dev/hda3 / (+-15GB)
/dev/hda4 linux swap (512MB)
with about 15GB of free space for playing with other distros. Everything was running fine, including dual boot managed by grub.
This afternoon, Win decided not to boot. After the grub menu the Win ME splash screen pops up, then after a few seconds a bluescreen with
"Windows protection error. You will need to restart your computer. System Halted."
(or words to that effect) pops up. Needless to say, restarting doesn't help. I'm hoping that trying to fix the MBR with some Win tool may help, and praying that reinstallation is not necessary since I only have an installation image (not full Win install) that came bundled with the computer. Plus, my girlfriend will kill me if I can't make it work without destructively reinstalling
The only feature I was having problems with in Win the last time I used it was the media player library file msdxm.ocx --- nothing devastating. Then I booted into Linux and did some tweaking to try get Mozilla to use my bookmarks and local mail folders from my Win partition (I had previously soft linked some files to the Win partition; I don't recall actually making any changes this time round). That was when Win went all soft and gooey....
Booting from a Win emergency floppy, I ran scandisk and was told that one of the files that was softlinked was misreporting its size. No other problems, and I didn't see why my Inbox should cause Win not to boot!
I'm going to unlink all those files now, see if that possibly makes a difference. If I win, you'll hear from me, otherwise... help!
Robert.
