I have installed RH7.2 on a Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop.

I edited my grub.conf to access my XP partition, but the screen just flickers and I cannot go into XP.

When I did a fdisk -l , I got the fol. info:

/dev/hda1 Dell Utility
/dev/hda2 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda3 Win95 Extd
/dev/hda5 Linux Swap
/dev/hda6 ext2

The fol. info is given on the Dell site:
Hard Drive-based Recovery System — Recovery files are placed on a separate partition of the hard drive that can be accessed if system recovery is needed. No CDs are needed and in most cases the PC can "heal" itself.

I do not have a floppy drive. So now how do I access my XP system. Even if I re-install linux (or get XP to its original state) I would still have the same problem right?

Thanks!

Well no, depending on which boot manager you used, you can either:
1. restore you MBR and/or
2. Install the boot loader to the first sector of whatever partition you'd like.

At least that's what I would think, let's see what other's have to say.

Oh and a q, what boot loader did you choose to use?

i'm going to have to write a multi-boot HOWTO....
ok, when you get back, tell us:

1. Like he said, Which bootloader? from "edited my grub.conf" I might assume you did GRUB but it can't hurt to be sure...

Assuming you did use GRUB,
2. Check the table again, which partiton is set active? That is, which has the boot flag? and there's only one...

If this (below) is the case, change the grub.conf entry to rootnoverify (hd0,0) and go to town.

If this (below) is not the case, if instead /dev/hda2 has the boot flag, it also has the bootsector, and XP's bootloader. make sure it's rootnoverify (hd0,1) and call back soon. That's the only thing that might go wrong... normally.

The case:
If the first partition (/dev/hda1) has the boot flag, there's a simple answer. XP loaded from /dev/hda2 (in *nix terms) but the boot files were on the first partiton- "system partiton" in M$ terms. That means there's no bootsector on /dev/hda2, the XP bootloader sits on /dev/hda1, and the boot.ini on /dev/hda1 points to a XP install on /dev/hda2.

maybe another way to check this quickly is to try mounting /dev/hda1, it's probably FAT not NTFS so mkdir /mnt/dell && mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/dell, then go into /mnt/dell and look for hidden files named ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini . That would verify it, i think. if you can't mount it at all, even if you try different FS types, forget it- just go look for the boot flag.

I never dealt with laptops, so weird things can happen... that I'm not familiar with....