About a month ago, i installed redhat 8.0 on my first drive, this cause the mbr to boot windows to be overwritten.I have winxp installed on my second drive. I have been booting into winxp from a bootdisk(takes some time compared to when it was in the mbr). I am using grub to boot into linux, i added winxp into the boot menu, for the second drive and the right parition, but this doesnt work. Can some one help boot into winxp from the grub menu, or if there is an easier way to do it please tell me. Thanks to who ever can help me.

What does your grub.conf look like. Grub passes off the loading process to XP by using a chainloader. This is what my grub.conf looks like:

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
# root (hd0,1)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda3
# initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
#default=3
timeout=15
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

title Red Hat Linux (2.4.18-24.8.0)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.18-24.8.0 ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi
initrd /initrd-2.4.18-24.8.0.img

I also have a dual boot WinXP and RedHat. Hope this helps.

well if i was to use the chainloader to boot into winxp wouldnt the mbr be overwritten so it would boot anyway. or does the chainloader link to winxp. im going into rehdat now to see what grub.conf looks like. ill be brb

chainloader +1 passes control of booting over to Windows boot loader.

here is the test from grub.conf
if there is something i need to change please tell me for example +1 chainloader if it lets the loader go over windows boot loader, how does it kno where to look for it, was it overwritten when i installed grub.

# Grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You do not have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /, eg.
# root (hd0,0)
# kernel /boot/vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda1
# initrd /boot/initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.18-24.8.0)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-24.8.0 ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi
initrd /boot/initrd-2.4.18-24.8.0.img
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.18-14)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-14 ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi
initrd /boot/initrd-2.4.18-14.img
title DOS
rootnoverify (hd0,4)
chainloader +1
title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1

This is why at i get mad at this forum, no one will reply after a couple post. i have no idea where to go and i dotn like makign another useless post.

calm down dude. try this in /boot/grub/grub.conf:

title Windows XP
map (hd0,0) (hd1,0)
map (hd1,0) (hd0,0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1

Save the file and reboot. NOTE: /etc/grub is a link to /boot/grub/grub.conf.

Thanks for help born4linux, i changed the grub.conf and it worked most of the way, it said it was missing the ntldr, which i know to be the file taht tells the computer where to look to boot for winxp. i have a copy of ntldr in my bootdisk where do i put ntldr so that i can boot into xp.