Hey everyone,

I'm a relatively new Linux user. I've installed ubuntu with no problems on my laptop before and recently, after a major mobo meltdown decided to redo my entire desktop setup. I'll try and give as many details as possible. I'm installing using a burned DVD iso image of the netInst for x386. I have a Intel Quadcore 2.6ghz processor, 2Gb of DDR2 ram, nvidia 8600gtx graphics card, and three hds: 2 hitachi 156gb drives (originally in Raid, not currently), and a 750gb samsung. All hard drives are SATA and Raid is no longer setup because of winxp issues.

So far I've gone through about 2 installs of winxp (sp3) and two of debian with no luck. What I'm trying to do now is just use my samsung harddrive and setup three separate partitions. One at 400gb for xp, one at 100gb for debian, and the rest as fat32 space that I can use on both OS.

I installed xp successfully on the first partition without a problem. Restarted to install debian on the second partition. After choosing guided setup and letting debian create the swap partition and the main partition on the second setup, install seemed to go as planned. No errors and complete successfully. After restarting and changing BIOS settings to boot from hd i get the error "error loading operating system". From here I don't get any options. No access to windows or debian. Any advice is greatly appreciated. Even if I'd be better off installing to separate drives, I'm just tired of reinstalling winxp so may times.

Thanks in advance.

Terror.

Are you installing the Grub Bootloader to MBR? It seems you may be leaving this step out.

The problem seems to be in the Grub file.

If you installed Debian Lenny, you should have installed as default Grub 0.96 wich configuration file is in the path /boot/grub/menu.lst

But the problem is that you can't access any OS to edit this file. One way to solve is to use a live CD, to boot from the CD and edit that file from there.

You could use Knnopix, a debien based distro in live cd.

If you decide to go this way, from the console as root, do this:

This will show us the paritions info. After this we could give you a hand about how to edit your menu.lst file correctly (Grub configuration file).

thanks for the help and responses..I wound up reinstalling, windows to one drive and linux to the other and didn't have any problems. Grub 1.5? picked up both installs and works correctly now. Thanks!

Terror.

Great, Beta version of Grub2 you mean, you could see you /boot/grub/grub.cfg file to check it, and see how it configured your windows HD.