I have had Linux running on my computer for some time now, and I have finally decided to install windows for audio/video editing. Fortunately, before installing Linux, I partitioned the harddrive expecting this. Here is my setup: (fdisk -l)

hda1=windows, hda2=/boot, hda5=swap, hda6=root, and hda7 is a shared data partition.

I tried to install windows on hda1 and of course it put the windows loader on my MBR. I figued I'll stick with it, and install grub when the installation is over. But, during the first installation reboot, after the bios, it said that the operating system couldn't be found. Humm... So I edited my grub.conf and reinstalled grub thinking that maybe I just needed to boot with grub. My grub.conf looks like this:

After selecting Windows XP, the screen cleared and then sat there, just displaying the grub boot options. So, I tried to reinstall Windows XP to no avail. Then I installed Windows 2k pro, and the same thing happened. What can cause this to happen? I know I have LBA support because I have been booting off of hda2 for a while and it is well past cyl 1024.

I honestly have no idea why this could be happening. Maybe I need to set a flag on one of the partitions? Or maybe there is something wrong with my partitioning scheme. I've run XP on this machine before, so I know it isn't a simple compatablity issue.

Thank you for your time,

Paul Giblock

title WinNT/XP
hide (hd0,0)
unhide (hd1,0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
boot

add the above lines to your grub.conf ... see if it works

No, that didn't help at all, and I don't see why it would. I only have one harddrive so why would I even want to reference hd1? And besides, shouldn't this have worked when Windows installed its own bootloader into the mbr? Any other suggestions?

Paul

I have tried something derived from your last post like:

title Windows XP Pro
hide (hd0,1)
hide (hd0,5)
hide (hd0,6)
unhide (hd0,0)
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
boot

and that doesn't work either, so I changed it back to how it was. Then I booted with the Windows cd to get into the recovery console. I tried fixboot c: and that didnt work. So I tried fixboot c: AND fixmbr. Of course grub was overwritten, but windows still didn't boot. So I reinstalled grub and now I am still where I was when I started the thread. I did notice something I thought was bizarre inside of Windows recovery's MAP command. Here is the output:

I notice that there are two Partition0's. I do not know why the first partition0 is there. I do know that the 2nd one is my extended partition. Is this normal behavior? or should C: be Partition0, \boot be Partition1, and extended be Partition2 ? I'm unsure because I have never used the MAP utility before.

Thanks
Paul

Anyone else? I've made some desperate attempts, and it still won't boot into WinXP.

get your xp cd and get into repair mode

type help

look for fixmbr or something like that... it'll give you your mbr back

then you can go do whatever you want... keep win32, or reinstall lilo or grub on hda0 (mbr area)

if you read through the thread you would see i have tried both fixboot and fixmbr.

Thanks anyways


Btw, my hard disk is bigger then yours

Well, if you're sure your BIOS is using LBA for the HDD, then my second guess would be the HDD is configured as "cable select" instead of master. 90% of the time when this happens to me it's one of those two problems. Manually specifying LBA and master, rather than letting the BIOS auto-configure the settings, usually resolves it.

If those suggestions don't fix the prob, I'd try formatting hda1 as FAT32 (using a 98 or ME boot disk) and let Windows setup convert it to NTFS later.

great suggestion crito. I actually had another harddrive on this bus a while ago. So the drive is probably set to Master or CS and I should try setting it to Single. I will try this once I get into my computer.

Thanks,
Paul

My drive didn't have any jumpers set (which means that it was set as factory single) but I changed it to another "single" mode and that didn't work, neither did setting it to cable select. I currently have it in single. It's starting to look like my problem is inexplainable. I still wonder why partition0 shows up twice when calling MAP from the Windows Recovery Console. I posted the output on my third post. What do you mean about setting it up with win98 first? Are you saying do a full install of win98 then overwrite it with a winxp setup? won't that require reformatting to ntfs and I will be where I am now. I tried select FAT for my partition type in the WinXP or Win2K setup already (I forget which one it was). But I will gladly try your suggestion if you clarify what I need to do.

Thanks

Do a search for xp behavior with multiple partitions on the drive. I seem to recall runing across something on this (there is an issue with xp) in the past couple of days.

You may be better off installing xp to a different drive and letting GRUB do the OS boot arbitration from the MBR on hd0.

I actually found the solution to my problem.

For explanation and fixes see:
http://www.ces.clemson.edu/linux/fc2.shtml
and
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedor.../msg00908.html
or
http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/

It seems that when I setup my partition table I used parted. Parted wrote incorrect disk geometry to the disk (it used a head count of 16 instead of 255) Linux apparently reads the information from the BIOS while Windows reads it from the disk. simply changing the head count to 255 (with sfdisk) fixed the problem.

Thanks, I hope this helps other people out too. What a weird problem.

I have noticed a problem though. Whenever I boot into Windows it changes all my 0x83 (Linux) partitions to 0x93 (Amoeba). This causes GRUB and Linux to quit functioning since they are housed on those partitions. GRUB throws an Error 17 I think. I don't know if this is because of Windows or because of me changing the geometry on my drive. In order to fix the problem I have to boot with a live CD, when attempting to run cfdisk I get the following error:
Is there anyway to realign my partitions? or is this not a problem. How can I keep Windows from changing the partition type?

Thanks