Windows XP is not booting! Kinda urgent, any help greatly appreciated
 

Okay, I gotta say I am a permanently bonded linux user, but I have to rely on Windows XP for my electronic music production career. And after the installation of Fedora Core 2, Windows XP will not boot with GRUB! Before I installed FC2, I used PowerQuest PartitionMagic 8 to resize my NTFS partition to give a little over 6GB free space for playing with linux, and it worked just fine afterwards, booting from the windows MBR. During the FC2 setup, it said the partition tables were a little funky and the bootloader might have problems ... sounds very familiar. I just hoped everything would turn out fine, but it didn't. I'm pretty concerned, but not very worried - I know it's just a bootloader problem and that all my data's still safe. Kinda nervous about it though - I have years of musical effort put into that partition ...

I will give as many details as I can ... after attempting a GRUB boot to XP, it says in native text the chainloader stuff, but hangs there. It does not boot, however, it still responds to a Alt-Ctrl-Del keystroke. As far as it goes, that's it. Any information will be gladly provided upon request!

Oh yeah, and FC2 boots perfectly with no problems whatsoever. So I'm still online :) Good 'ol linux.

Any ideas on how to revive XP?

hi there

can u boot XP after u remove grub
also post ur grub.conf and "fdisk -l" output here

regards

This is the only thing related to Win XP in grub.conf:

title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

fdisk appears to not even be installed on my FC2 system - I type fdisk and it says bash: fdisk: command not found.

I don't really wanna just up and remove grub ... it would be better if I could just fix this straight up. I'm sure it'll boot with the windows MBR though, cause it has booted from it before GRUB was implemented.

hi
as u told that u had resized ur windows NTFS partions
so how can we know here that how does ur partiton table looks like(to see whether u r booting windows from the corect partition)

regards

I'm sure Windows is on hda1. It was originally, even after I resized it, and the Hardware Browser even says so ...

My partition setup looks like this:

/dev/hda
hda1 ntfs
hda2 ext3 /boot
hda3 ext3 /
hda4 extended
hda5 swap

It's a good thing you mentioned the windows MBR before this got too complicated ... I just installed the windows MBR again and it can't boot. I'm still not worried though - it did boot just fine before. I'm gonna repair it with Windows' automated repair stuff on the CD. It ought 'a fix it. Then I'll just install FC2 again. I know I could just put GRUB back on there, but I originally wanted XFS anyway ...

I'll post on the progress, thanks for the help masand!

hi there
ok. so u figured out ur problem this is good!!
also what error do u get when u booted windows with windows MBR

also pl. telll me why do uneed to instrall FC2 again if u reinstall windows

regards

SO ... I actually ended up reinstalling Windows XP ... the whole damn thing ... yup. That recovery console just got it more confused. Now I'm basking in updates and driver installations. Can't wait to get back to Linux.

I was going to reinstall FC2 because I wanted to run an XFS filesystem rather than ext3. But halfway through the reinstallation, I noticed that is wasn't an option. How could this be? XFS is a great filesystem, it should be available on this openly-open-source project ... can I use XFS or is it not a good idea?

hi
i haven't used XFS
but i know that ext3 with JFS(journaled file system)
keeps a good FS,
i also heard that reiserfs is a good FS,but i have been sticking to standard ext3

regards

Yeah ... looks like I'm stickin to ext3. Oh well, it's lightning fast anyways :)

Worse news for windows - I had to FORMAT the hard drive! Of coarse, I coped all my electronic production onto a 10GB drive beforehand, but yeah, my partition tables got stabbed in the heart for all it knew. That's the first time Partition Magic failed on me :eek: I don't know if I'm going to trust it now!

But my system is going to run great with a spankin new XP and a spankin new FC2. I'm sure the dual boot is going to work flawlessly as usual this time. What a mess this was ...

resizing partions
 

resizing partions = never a good idea ...LOL

hi
if u do not go for partition magic and these 3d party softwares u will not be having any problems...
i have been using standard tools
fdisk on linux and win and never faced a problem on dual booting xept fot my mistakes

regards

Bad news! I just installed FC2 again and XP won't boot! :cry:

It just sits at the chainloader again ... this totally sucks. I bet it's something totally simple, but I don't know what to do! Windows XP is perfect, FC2 is perfect - they're totally fresh installations and everything!

The partition tables are the same as I intended on having em before (posted at top). Perhaps that has something to do with it?

Yikes! http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/....cgi?id=115980

Well I looked through the bug, and after hearing how that one thing was tricking the BIOS into a different read access type, I set my main drive to large, and walla, I'm in Windows XP again! I guess this whole thing was a bug. Oh well, this will definately be covered soon, I'll say ...