I have a Windows XP Professional machine (P4, 2x120GB, 1x80GBSATA) machine.

XP Pro is installed on the primary 120GB drive.

I proceeded to install RH-Linux 9 on the 80GB drive. After the install i tried to boot to the DOS O/S from the Grub screen but everytime XP would reboot after a few seconds of the XP Boot logo.

As per suggestions on this group and others, I decided to clean up Grub by booting from a Win98 CD and doing an fdisk/mbr.

After this I do not get a Grub screen and XP progresses beyond the initial logo and then throws up a fatal error "C000021a fatal system error - Session manager initialization problem".

I tried to install XP again after booting from the XP CD and strangely enough it detects my C drive (primary partition on 120GB) as K drive and the D drive (second partition on the first 120GB) is missing. It detects the two partitions on my second drive as C and D. The bigger problem is it does not let me install XP on the K drive and states I have to delete the partition and reload XP.

From the XP recovery console I can see my C drive (as K drive) and all my data does exist.

Any suggestions, please help !

did you check your jumper settings? It sounds like XP is confused about master slave settings. Set the 120 as master and 80 as slave and reinstall.

I believe the whole issue may have been caused by Roxio Goback. I had this program installed on XP and Goback runs from the boot area. Having installed Grub in the boot area there could have been potential conflicts with Goback causing the system not to boot from XP.

BTW, I am still looking for answers to help me solve this problem.

Go Back could have been the problem.

I would think that maybe your XP installation is OK. The non-recognition of the second drive is because XP won't recognize the EXT3 files sytem.

I would recommend using the Recovery Consol proved on the XP disk. If you have an XP book, learn the commands and you can repair the MBR for XP. This will overwrite the old MBR and destry the GRUB (no big deal)...but make sure that you have a Linux bood diskette handy). After the Sys.ini files and MBR are working in XP...see that it works. Then boot into Linux and re-install GRUB. I'm not sure where BoBack would fit into this picture at this point. You would probably have to re-install that too.

The only other option, I would think, would be to start over, but if you can get into your disk with DOS or some other way of seeing your important data, get those safe first.

I have installed RH9 on SEVERAL machines, also re-installed several times on different partitions and disks on WinXP and Win2000 machines and never had a problem with corruption of the boot sector for WinXP. That's why I think that you are onto something with GO back. Also i am in agreement that you should check your jumpers. However, after checking the Jumpers and if you change them, then you definitely will have a WinXP boot problem until you rebuild a MBR or re-install.

Bummer...

You can backup your MBR in linux using the dd command. You can use it backup GRUB, the XP MBR, and maybe copy them to a floppy disk.
dd if=/dev/hda of=/backup bs=512 count=1
The above copies whatever's installed on the first disk's MBR to a file.
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1
This copies the MBR on the first disk to a floppy. It worked with Windows ME.