I have been using Linux for well over 8 years now. After using many different distros I have settled with Suse. I have been using Suse 9.1 since it's release on my Toshiba laptop without a problem. I decided to install this on one of my desktop machines (nforce2) along with WinXP on the same HD.

Installation went well and it was really easy. I just assumed everything would be ok. Oh. how I was mistaken. Suse installed fine and I was happily using it for a few hours installing stuff and configuring services, etc. I then needed to boot XP for a gameplaying fix. This is where it all went wrong. It just hung just before it should have given me the Windows boot menu. I thought fine. Boot the recovery console and fix problem. Shouldn't be a problem. This didn't work. I remade the boot.ini file, ran fixboot, etc. Nothing worked. I got a bit worried now.

So I booted Suse and still had access to my XP partition. I stuck in a disk formatted for Windows. I copied across the required files and made an XP boot disk. This also didn't work. I received an error message saying hal.dll was corrupt - great. It's there. I ran recovery console again and checked. This isn't XPs fault. Was working fine earlier.

So. Whenever in doubt what do you do. You go to LinuxQuestions. I searched for an hour or so and found that Mankdrake 10 users got very similar errors. After about 10 pages of people telling other people to go through the steps I had already gone through It was said that you should go into the BIOS and change the HD mode from auto to LBA - fix the error then switch back to auto. Fine. I'll try that. It worked - sort of. I got into WinXP (after it searched and installed ALL my hardware again!! Dunno why that was. Any suggestions?) then ran Partition magic. Where is says the disk is showing incorrect geometry. It also said it was fixing something. Cool I thought. Job done - i'll switch back to auto and go get a celebratory beer basking in my excellence.

Errrr - no. XP loads but something isn't right. I checked Partition Magic again. Still comes up with an error. I also need to configure my hardware again. ACPI isn't working as it should anymore. Why the hell not? What did Suse do? I really don't like things not to be perfect. How can I fix the geometry of the HD? Has anyone got answers to these questions? I hope the problems and how I solved em helps someone but can anyone help make this be a complete solution?

Cheers,
Gaz

If your hard drive is formatted in FAT32 you could attempt to repair the WinXP partition with a boot disk with Norton Disk Doctor.

Unfortunately it is NTFS. I haven't used FAT32 for years. There must be a utility out there that will fix this. I don't understand why Partition Magic won't fix it.

Try running Norton Windoctor from Wine to fix the file, that might work if it sees the NTFS partition (Which Linux can do read only, though there is experimental support for NTFS, so you will either have to wait or reinstall WinXP.)

Moved to Linux-General. This isn't really a Success Story.