I have Feisty, Vista and XP installed in my machine and i am going nuts trying to make XP work again.
I can select the 3 options from grub..
Ubuntu boots fine, the vista boot loader also works.. but the XP option gives me a black screen and nothing else.

I checked the /boot/grub/menu.lst and the output from the df command, and the entry in the grub menu is right, on /dev/sda4.

And then i tried changing the partition number in the boot.ini file to 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 and still no luck.
I have the 3 necesary files for xp to boot in that partition, boot.ini, ntdetect.com and ntldr.

i think that maybe my problem is the way i have partitioned my disk.. looks like a mess.. but it should work.
here is the picture of my disk management in vista so you can see whats going on:





C, E, D, and F are NTFS partitions... and XP is installed on the Wingames (F. That is the one im trying to boot.

The other partitions without letters 14gb and 690mb are ubuntu and the swap partition..
the temp partition is a logical drive that i created so i could make more than the 4 limit partitions to be able to install ubuntu.
do any of you have any experience on this?

thanks a lot

I can't be of help, except that I can say something about this way you're triple-booting: a friend of mine did the same trick (bad luck: installed Vista as the last one) and the result was that GRUB got removed (as usual), Ubuntu worked fine, Vista worked somehow (but not perfectly) and XP threw errors at your face all the time (so it didn't work). Vista was installed as separately from XP as possible but during the setup it did detect XP and it seems something didn't go all right; I'm not sure what Vista actually did but surely it messed up with XP system files and caused it to malfunction.

My advice was to do a fresh, clean install: start off with Vista, after that XP and as the last one, Linux. Over the years this has proven to be the best working solution, and now that Vista has been released, I've seen only trouble if it's installed after some other OS (Windows or not).

Hopefully it's something small in your case; my friend's operating systems aren't still working properly today.

Hi,

XP does not like to boot unless it is located in the 1st primary partition. You can try re-installing it there.

Also, windows/dos systems get confused when there's more than one windows os installed. You can use grub to 'trick' XP to not see the other windows partitions.

Check out how to hide partitions from XP here:
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/man...2fWindows.html

Hope this helps,
Sam