i have had red hat 9 on my computer for about 6 months and i just had to reinstall it on my computer recently. I have Windows Xp installed on my first hard drive, and Red Hat is installed on my second hard drive in a small partition. the rest of the drive is ntfs. when i boot my computer i get the GRUB boot loader with the red hat and windows options. Red hat boots just fine. when i choose windows i get the "windows was not shut down properly screen" with the options to boot normaly, safe mode etc... When i choose ANY option it begins to load, the the computer reboots. i can just make out the Windows Xp loading screen, then it just goes black and reboots.

i know that all of my windows files are there, because i have installed ntfs support in red hat and i can mount my windows drives, and all of my files are OK.

i have also checked the grub.conf file and everything appears to be fine.

I would prefer to no delete any os from my computer. if anything red hat can be sacrificed.

i guess you could make a linux boot disk, reboot, put in your windows setup cds, try and fix the mbr in the recovery console, boot up into linux and reinstall grub with "grub-install /dev/hda".

but it could be that windows needs to be reinstalled also, since you are getting boot up screens when choosing windows. maybe try a dirty install of xp (make a linux boot disk though so you can boot into linux and reinstall grub as i believe xp will overwrite grub).

How about re-writing your Master Boot Record?

fdisk /mbr

i also suggest a reinstall of windoxe, but do remember to make a linux boot floppy first!!

then again, if it was a perfect world you wouldn't have windoze installed in the first place lol

This problem happened to me, but with a win2k installation. There were no problems, then I installed the service pack 3, and in a week the system just restarts after giving me an option to choose safe-mode et.al., saying that I have done an incomplete shut-down.

I had to finally reinstall win2k, and that is one of my sad stories with windoz...

I had the exact same problem with my install of RH9 and WinXP . It is a simple fix just configure to boot from your WinXp install disk and rewrite your MBR , and then I myself prefer Lilo boot loader but that is up to you .
P.S. I am running Win98 , WinXP ,Red Hat 9 and Mandrake 9.1 on the same HDD with no problems using Lilo

i also had that problem with redhat and xp, i issued the command fixmbr in the console then reinstall redhat.. thats it!

in future lilo is better (my opinion... never had problems)

IMHO-Food For Thought.

1) I agree about lilo, but as I get to know grub better, I may change my mind -- it does have some advantages.

2) if the computer will *allow* it (and some computers (BIOS?) don't), I always put the linux loader (lilo or grub) into the Linux partitions, specifically, I always use a 3-partition scheme: /boot, /, and swap, and use a normal win/os2/dos/linux/etc MBR, thus the worst after a WInstall is having to use a floppy or something to allow me to re-set the active partition to the Linux /boot. (Also means that only /boot has to be within whatever boot-allowed limits a given computer imposes -- I currently make /boot ~~70meg.)

3) havnig said all that, I have not played with W2K or WXP on the same computer as Linux, so it may not apply -- they may do more to the MBR..... Sigh.

4) W does have the most games, and arguably still has the best A/V stuff. (Hey Guys!, We're WAI-TING!)

5) for other types of Win-Progs, try Win4Lin (www.netraverse.com), or vmware or the that new one that came out recently (sorry, don't remember name at this particular nano-second... Sigh!).

P.S.: UltimaGuy, Like your sig, whadda you think of mine?

LOL!,
Robert G. Hays
----------
Words Of Wisdom:
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
Be sure brain is in gear before engaging mouth.
!!THINK FIRST!! (, last, and always!)

thanks. im really busy right now, i hope to try fdisk the mbr soon.

well i reinstalled red hat 9 and i got the same problem.

i took my computer into my linux class (only high school linux class in the state ) my teacher and some other students worked on it and we have determinded that its a 100% windows problem, though that doesent get me anywhere.

Windows just dies sometimes...

Hi,

Your problem has nothing to do with linux, your bootloader, or our mbr.

If you can even boot to an XP loading screen, it is fine. One thing I have seen in XP (and I have worked on a lot of machines with the pig of an OS on it, no offense to those who like it) when it has symptoms like that I have found a few different things can cause it. Device drivers that get corrupted can do it. Most of the times this is the problem. But, I have also seen a kernel dump and restart from a bios glitch as well. Reseting it can help sometimes. These are the main problems I have seen with it.

I think what you might be able to do is boot with the XP cd in recovery console (total misnomer) and clean out your startup, and remove the enum directory in the registry in HKLM>LOCAL_MACHINE>ENUM. This clears all record of the device drivers, and windows will redetect them when it boots again. One caveat, if it screws up do *not* blame me...I didnt design the system

So, having said that, I wish you all the luck, I have chased problems like that before, and have found that in 1 or 2 cases, I could not get it working and had to rebuild the system. I hope that doesnt happen to you.

One thing...as a side comment...I have found that of the OSs, windows is my most expendable...when Linux crashes, you can figure out how to get it running in most cases (unless you have a hardware failure). But Windows? Sometimes not. Little thought from me to you

Hope it helps!

oops, nothing to see here, move along, move along

Hey,

I received to my overwhelming disappointment, the same error (Windows inproperly shutdown, would you like to start in safe mode, etc. ). However, it quickly turned in a blue screen of death saying "PFN_LIST_CORRUPT"

So well, that was nice, I tried a lot of things, however, well once you lose your admin password you're pretty much stuck. I didn't try fixmbr though...

I ended up rebooting with the windows XP CD, formatting the drive and reinstalling windows. Lovely process... argh. Anyhow needless to say after 4 hours, I finally have my dual boot system.

just had an unlucky BSOD with XP after trying to use demo drivers to view my EXT3 drives... now I have to rewrite my MBR too. Just wait 9in vain I know) for photoshop for linux, I'll throw XP out as soon a photoshop4linux is developed.