I just recently installed Red Hat 9.0. I used Partition Magic to partition my hard drive before installing Red Hat. Whenever I use fdisk it prints out something like this:

Device Boot Start End Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 592 b Win95 Fat32
/dev/hda2 593 10624 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda3 10625 10637 83 Linux
/dev/hda4 10638 14593 f Win95 Ext'd(LBA)
/dev/hda5 14594 14463 83 Linux
/dev/hda6 14464 14593 82 Linux swap

I'm using the grub bootlaoder and it boots red hat fine but when I try to boot windows it just spits out:

Booting Command List
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

Then it's just a blinking cursor with no response. I can't seem to get a print out of my grub.conf or menu.lst files either. Whenever I try to access them it just gives me a 'permission denied' response.

I can boot into the recovery console of XP with the grub instructions:

rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

but that doesn't really do me a lot of good.

I wouldn't mind reinstalling redhat or xp but I really need to get some documents and files off the XP partition before I reformat it.

Will sombody please help me out. It'd be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot.

to edit grub.conf you need to be root. type "su" in the prompt and then use an appropriate editor to look for "rootnoverify(hd0,1) ..." and change that to the one that you used to load into XP ... then rerun grub to write to your boot sector. Why is it only letting you into recovery console .. it should let you into normal i think. Also, i thought that XP likes to be on the first partition and nothing else.

you dont need to reinstall

in a console type

vi /boot/grub/brun.conf

(vi is just a text editor you can use any text editior you want like kedit)

kedit /boot/grub/brun.conf

my grub.conf file looks like this, I think the map command is the trick. It may have to be configured differently on you machine though because I have two hard drived hda0 and hda1 wher'as you have one drive that has many partitions.

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You do not have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /, eg.
# root (hd0,3)
# kernel /boot/vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda4
# initrd /boot/initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,3)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Fedora Core (2.4.22-1.2115.nptl)
root (hd0,3)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl ro root=LABEL=/1 hdc=ide-scsi rhgb
initrd /boot/initrd-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl.img
title Windows XP
map(hd1)(hd0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
boot

can you elaborate on this? do you have recovery console installed on your harddrive?

By the way you need not to re-run grub for the change to take effect, the config file is read everytime it loads (unlike LILO), and the map command won't do any good on single harddrive.

Here's my grub.conf file. I think the problem is that my computer come with two partitions on the hardrive(hda1 and hda2). hda1 is the recovery console that stores all the data so if my computer jacks up it has all the information right there to restore it to factory condition. Is there anyway that I can swap the two partitions hda2 and hda1 or do you even think that will fix it? I've tried map (hd0,1)(hd0,0) but that gives me an error. Thanks for the help.

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
# root (hd0,2)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda5
# initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=2
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,2)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.20-6smp)
root (hd0,2)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-6smp ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi
initrd /initrd-2.4.20-6smp.img
title Red Hat Linux-up (2.4.20-6)
root (hd0,2)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-6 ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi
initrd /initrd-2.4.20-6.img
title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Is it the windows xp recovery console or another recovery software provided by the manufactorer?
ie are there boot.ini, ntldr and ntdetect.com in hda1?
If you use the winxp recovery console to do a fixmbr/fixboot you should be able to get back into it, but you'll have to reinstall grub afterwards (or use the nt os loader)

If all you want is get the documents off the winxp partition try the Linux - ntfs driver here:
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/
download the rpm package that matches your kernel