i have just finished installing red hat enterprise ws 4 on my computer which also had win XP intalled on it earlier..i used partition magic before starting the installation to create a linux partition and a swap partition to go with it. the installation as such went off very smoothly. i renamed the extra free space that was left as / to represent the root file system and created a /boot filesystem from it of 100 mb. but now, when i reboot and try to start XP, i get some strange errors...

first, a screen comes up saying
"autochk not found. skipping autocheck"

and then a blue screen shows up with some error that goes like this(almost):-

"stop:c000021a {fatal system error}
the session manager initialization system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc00003a {0x00000000,0x00000000}
The system is shut down"

red hat works very fine now but i need to have XP working too..

is there any way to rectify this??

thanks for any help

PS:unfortunately, i totally forgot to make rescue disks from partition magic..

I believe partition magic comes with software called "boot magic", that lets you choose which OS boots and such, have you tried that?

what does the error from windows look like, is it a blue screen? How far does windows boot?

Also, which OS is on the master boot record, do you know? When you boot up and get to choose which OS to boot, do you choose it from a grub or lilo menu, or a windows menu? Or are you able to choose it in the BIOS?

If you just want to get into windows, you can boot off your windows CD and go through the menus to repair windows - you may just need to let it repair the master boot record, or you may need to let it repair the whole thing. But then you probably won't be able to get to linux without a linux rescue disk, so I'd make one of those first if that's the route you go (your linux CD may be useful as a rescue disk to boot your linux installation with, although that's an annoying way to have to boot linux)

well I would add to what torfe said that when you boot from your winxp cd enter the repair console "choose the repair option the first time it is offered to you" and then type FIXBOOT... if that does not work repeat the previous procedure but this time type FIXMBR this would create a new Master Boot Record allowing you to boot WIN XP but it would wype away your lilo config.

For more info read:
http://www.itnetcentral.com/pcworld/...World&leveli=0

I had the same trouble ie; c000021a status 0xc000003a. It seems as the partition containing xp got set to a hidden partition. You can fix it using any bootable linux cd, then using cfdisk change the type of partition to a normal one. Hidden ones have bit five set, ie. 17 = hidden ntfs and 07 = ntfs. After you write the disk, it boot just fine into xp.