Problem With Fedora Core 3 and WinXP...
 

Okay. I just got Fedora installed on my WinXP laptop. Whenever I start my computer up, it loads GRUB and works fine UNTIL I pick Windows XP from the menu. It starts loading fine and then right about when it's done loading, BOOM and the blue screen of death pops up with a fatal error saying that the system had to be shut down. What should I do?? There are still things in Windows that I need to use and now that Fedora has seemingly rendered XP completely useless, I can't get to them. Help please!

Maybe it's serious, maybe it's not. If all you need are the files (this might require a reinstall of Windows) then you are safe. If you need some specific program to run, well, you might have aproblem. See google for microsoft help.

Please state what you need, to provide further assistance.

It's just kind of annoying not being able to have access to some of my WinXP-only programs, such as TrueCrypt and all of my programming resources that I am so used to. I'm thinking maybe it's because the Windows partition isn't set as an active partition, I'll have to check. Thanks though.

well you can set it as active with fdisk.

Did you try googling for the windows BSOD error?

As the root user from the FC3 terminal, run:

fdisk -l

and (1) verify that the xp partition is marked as bootable (i.e., has a “*” on the line) and (2) that the xp partition is not listed as hidden. If you are not sure, post the output here for us to look at.

The “xp not booting” problem usually has trivial causes, so try the easy/obvious stuff before you do anything drastic, like reloading xp.