Hi all,
I am having a frustrating problem booting into my XP partition. I recently deleted my XP partition because it had gotten slow and buggy. My laptop came with XP SP2 and I saved the partition onto an external hard-drive. At these point I had decided to copy the saved untouched partition and paste it to the now unallocated space. At this point it is probably a good idea to describe my partition structure.
/dev/sda4/---Extended Partition
---/dev/sda5/---XP Partition(NTFS)
---/dev/sda6/---Swap
---/dev/sda7/---Data(/home)(ext3)
/dev/sda3/---Ubuntu(/)(ext3)
/dev/sda2/---HDDRecovery-Came with Laptop(fat32)
This structure is the one that exists now, sadly, I do not remember exactly what the structure was before I deleting, copied, and pasted. However, I do remember that right after I made the change there was unallocated space before the extended partition; so, I allocated the space to /dev/sda4/. Then I extened my new XP partition which is within /dev/sda4/. I hope I did not make any dreadful mistakes yet. When I bootup with this structure I get grub; which used to boot ubuntu and windows perfectly. However, the changes made grub unable to boot windows normally. I understood that the structure had changed ; so, grub would naturally have problems. I went to edit grub's xp entry, but I was unsuccessful. I then remembered how windows is very unable to get along with friends. I used my XP disc, chose recovery, and executed fixmbr. It said it was succesfull, but it was not. Grub obviously was gone, but windows still would not boot up. When booting, the only thing that comes up is "Insert system disk in drive. Press any key when ready." I then tried to boot windows with a brub floppy, and that did not not work stated that I specified an invalid device. Then I tried booting up with GAG, and I got an error message saying Hal.dll was corrupt or missing. I read up on this error, and I was told that it was because of the boot.ini. So, I again went in with Xp recovery, and executed BootCfg /list. The prompt said there was nothing to list; so, I did BootCfg /rebuild. I chose my windows partition, gave it the correct name, and put /fastdetect for load options. Then the prompt said that the operation failed.
I have checked with a live cd, and confirmed that my windows partition is still there. Nothing seems out of place, but Knoppix said it was a dirty volume so it had to force mount. I am not sure what is even wrong. Please any help would be great.
-Hal

What is on sda1? If you can go to Konsole and give us a copy of fdisk -l

Based on what you say, you pasted the image of Windows in a logical partition. Windows needs to be on a primary partition, especially if that's where the image came from. Normally, the first partition (primary) is where Windows would have/should be installed. Once you have Windows installed where it was/should be, then you can easily restore grub in the MBR from a root terminal in Linux or from the the CD in a live session. If you have Windows installed in the first primary partition you would issue these four commands as root or sudo:
The "grub" command puts you in a grub session, the "root" specifies where grub files are located in the Ubuntu / partition, the "setup" specifies the MBR of the first disc, quit means your done.