Recovering XP boot after installing EasyPeasy 1.1 - Grub seems fine
 

First time poster, neophyte Linux user -- please be gentle!

I am using a netbook - Asus EEE pc 1000H - and after getting completely aggravated by the slowness of XP, was tempted by Jon Ramvi's EasyPeasy 1.1 I initially played with the distro on a USB drive, and liked it enough that I went ahead and installed it from said USB drive onto my laptop, *trying* to follow the directions for creating a dual-boot system.

(If I could get Office 2007 running at all through Wine, I would do away with XP altogether, but I can't...and please, no flaming about how superior Open Office is, and how crappy Windows is, etc. Please just accept that I REALLY like Word 07 and Excel 07, and want to keep using them despite having an easily-accessible-to-n00bz version of Linux as my OS...)

Anyway, I've been struggling to get Office 07 installed via Wine (a topic for another post), and decided perhaps I'd be better off just figuring out how to recover my XP boot and just logging into XP whenever I need to modify one of my Office 2007 docs. The problem is that something has gone wrong with my boot menu, so while I can SEE options to boot into something other than EasyPeasy 1.1, I get "Error 13" and "Error 17" messages, and can't *actually* boot to XP. (More details below.)

I found something that looked helpful here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ubuntu-694481/.

I followed CJS' directions to install and run testdisk, as follows:
I selected

1) Disk /dev/sdb - 32 GB / 30 GiB - ATA ASUS-PHISON SSD
2) [Intel]
3) [Advanced]

CJS then states I should select the Windows partition, but testdisk lists the following:

1* HPFS - NTFS
2 E extended
5 L Linux
x extended
6 L Linux Swap

I selected the first option, and originally the boot sectors were not identical. I followed CJS' directions, and now they are. Unfortunately, at this point his suggestions run out of utility for me - unlike the original poster in that thread, after rebooting I cannot even get a Blue Screen of Death.

I see three EasyPeasy boot choices, followed by

Normal boot (on /dev/sda1)
Perform Disk scan (on /dev/sda1)
Restore Factory Settings (on /dev/sda1)
Windows XP Professional

Selecting either of the first three choices produces the following result:

Error 17: Cannot mount selected partition. (Press any key to continue...)

Selecting the XP option produces the following:

Error 13: Invalid or unsupported executable format

Here is my Boot Info Summary:
Any ideas? W.r.t. to reinstalling anything, I am hampered by two major issues:

1) my netbook does not have an external CD drive, and
2) at any rate my XP install discs are living in the bottom of a storage container in Raleigh, NC -- and I am in Cairo for the next several months.

Hi,

Instead of jumping through hoops with 'WINE' you can try a 'VM' such as 'VirtualBox' for your XP install.

This link and others are available from 'Slackware-Links'. More than just Slackware® links!

EDIT:

You can recover your XP from the M$ recovery console. Then you can update your bootloader via the install media to reflect the new install.

I am not entirely sure what you mean by the above - what is the M$ recovery console? By this do you mean the Microsoft XP 'Recovery' option listed in the boot menu? If so, while I appreciate the suggestion, I'm going to need more guidance than that - as I mentioned in the original post, I get an error when I select that option. If not, and M$ stands for something else, please elaborate for me - like I said, I'm new at this!

I did a little bit of poking around and looking at VMWare, VirtualBox, etc., and I remain a little hesitant about using them. Part of the reason is that most of the folks I've seen write about those two seem to find a greater drop in performance than with Wine; another reason is that my frustration with getting Wine to work has made me leery of diving into yet another emulator[-type] installation.

Finally, as I mentioned in the post, I don't have access to my installation media, so I don't know that it would be feasible to pursue any approach that relies too heavily on my having an XP disc handy.

Thanks for the ideas, though, onebuck. Are there other suggestions you can think of?

Ive used both virtualbox and vmware. And yes it can run quite slow.

As a quick fix, Open Office will run .doc files. I am not sure about .xls files.

Just for peace of mind, try the following command and post the result:
If perhaps your xp got over written, the results would show that you no longer have the ntfs partition.

Covering all bases, did you backup everything from your xp partition before doing anything else?

When you dual boot you have to shrink the xp (ntfs) partition and add a separate linux partition. Prior to shrinking the ntfs partition, you needed to defrag the xp software at least three times. Defrag moves all of the binary 1's and 0's to one end of the disk leaving the rest of the disk blank. Failing to defrag may have caused windows xp or other data to be overwritten. If that is the case, as one buck stated, you will need to reinstall windows from disk and rerun grub for both partitions to work.

In spite of that, if you had not backed up your documents don't fear. Prior to reinstalling windows, you should be able to access the ntfs partition with linux using ntfs-3g program. Retrieve the data you need, then reinstall windows xp.

I'd say there is a mismatch between the BIOS disk order and what the init scripts present.
Try modifying the menu.lst entry for XP to

Thanks for the responses, guys - one thing at a time. First I'll respond to Okos' post, then I'll try sygoo's idea.

The product of my sudo fdisk -l is the following:

When I originally installed EasyPeasy, I backed things up manually. I'd not had the machine for terribly long, so I just copied all the files I actually cared about onto a flash memory card. I honestly don't recall whether I defragged three times or not - I imagine I probably didn't.

So to make sure I understand you correctly: Even if I'm not worried about having lost valuable personal documents because of my failure to defrag, I should still be concerned about having overwritten portions of the boot sector or something?

Many thanks!

@Sygoo:

I edited the menu.lst file as you recommended, and have made marginal progress: rather than getting the "Error 13" cited in the OP, I know get "Starting Up ...", with the ellipsis flashing at me and no other discernible activity. 10+ minutes of waiting resulted in no change on any of the three times I tried that.

Does it matter that my XP partition is installed on sdb1, rather than sda?

My understanding of the EEE 1000H's internal working is the following:

There are two SDDs, one that has an 8Gb capacity and one that has a 32Gb capacity. I *think* they are named sda1 and sda2 respectively - does that make sense? I also am fairly certain that when I installed XP on the machine (it shipped with Xandros) I placed the install on sda2 because (not knowing anything about computers *actually* work on the inside) I wasn't sure whether XP could reach outside the SDD on which it was installed in order to access other data/space...i.e., I wanted to give it the lion's share of the space on my laptop, so I put it on the bigger drive, which is #2.

So, Sygoo -- in reading up on these things, I have thought that (0,0) would tell the computer to look at the first partition on the first drive in order to seek out its boot instructions. Is that correct? But in this case, XP is on the first partition on the second drive -- so doesn't that make (1,0) the correct reference for it?

(I'm not challenging you, I'm trying to make sure I'm actually understanding how this all works...)

Hi,
One and in the same! M$=Microsoft, get it now?

First, a 'VM' is not a emulator. 'Wine' is a emulator.

As for performance benchmarks or performance as a whole will depend on the power of the 'host' machine. Along with the way the 'VM' is setup to provide services to the 'client' from the 'host'. If there is not sufficient memory allocation and poor virtual disk performance then your 'VM' will suffer.

You can setup XP as the host.

Onebuck, you wrote .

What does that mean? Is there a way for me to do that without having access to any XP discs/install media? If so, and you can talk me through it, I am *all* about that option. I just need more information than you have provided thus far.

Hi,

Install 'VirtualBox' on the XP then install the client OS on that host machine(XP). The client OS can be anything that the VM supports, even XP.

Normally yes, but what you see is what the init scripts present - which can be anything.
We all hope normally the init scripts are good.
Your layout doesn't make a lot of sense.

Try resetting the XP entry toJust trying things - hard to diagnose remotely.