I just installed Mandrake 9.1 on a machine that was already running WinXP. I used the recommended option to install into the Windows' partition's free space. The problem is that now Windows won't boot when I select it from the Boot Loader. It just gets stuck on the "Loading windows" screen.

The fact that I cannot load Windows is not so much a problem as is the fact that I NEED access to the files in my Windows partition. How do I go about getting at these? I read some information about how mounting may be what I need... so how do I do that?

Thanks in advance

If the windows partition is NTFS, I think mandrake 9.1 has NTFS support I dunno I've never used MD but the general mount command for that is

(first make a mount point)
(as root of course)
mkdir /mnt/windows
(then mount it)
mount -t ntfs /dev/hdXY /mnt/windows


or for a FAT32

mount -t vfat /dev/hdXY /mnt/windows

I'm assuming you know the dev naming system and how it works, if not, just go ahead and ask and we'll explain



edit: we'll make sure this works first, and then we'll check your booting procedure

If you can boot linux, then your windows partition should be already mounted in under /mnt/win_c or something like that - just look in the /mnt directory. You should be able to read the files.

Hi elipt

Taking this at face value - when people talk about installing in free space they're referring to installing into unpartitioned free space - not free space thats left over inside a current Windows partition.

Can you currently boot into Linux? Did you use LILO? - Can you post your lilo.conf file?

Open a Console

su
root password

cat /etc/lilo.conf

(Mandrake 9.1 can Read NTFS out of the box)

Yeah, it's NTFS. A couple things:
- How do I make a mount point?
- /mnt/windows already exists.
- When I try the mount command, it says that only the root can do that, although I'm assuming that this has something to do with making a mount point "as root".

boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
vga=normal
default="linux"
keytable=/boot/us.klt
prompt
nowarn
timeout=100
message=/boot/message
menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="linux"
root=/dev/hda5
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=mount hdc=ide-scsi acpi=off quiet"
vga=788
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="linux-nonfb"
root=/dev/hda5
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=mount hdc=ide-scsi acpi=off"
read-only
other=/dev/hda1
label="windows"
table=/dev/hda
other=/dev/fd0
label="floppy"
unsafe
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.21-0.13mdk
label="old_linux"
root=/dev/hda5
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.21-0.13mdk.img
append="quiet devfs=mount hdc=ide-scsi acpi=off"
vga=788
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="failsafe"
root=/dev/hda5
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=nomount hdc=ide-scsi acpi=off failsafe"
read-only

/mnt/windows is empty, or so it appears

In general - to create a mount point

Open a shell

su
root password

mkdir /mnt/windows

Have you actually cheked whether its already mounted in /mnt/windows?

in a terminal window, first become root using the su command. you will be asked for the root password. then do
mount /mnt/windows
this should mount the windows partition.

BTW, mandrake by default mounts all windows partitions it finds so it shouldn't be necessary to mount it. What is the output of the command df?

Su to root user in a shell - then type

mount –t ntfs –o ro /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows

then go to the /mnt/windows directory and check whether its mounted

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda1,
or too many mounted file systems

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5 5.4G 1.6G 3.6G 31% /
/dev/hda9 3.4G 148M 3.3G 5% /home

Can you post your mtab file?

su to root user in a shell

cat /etc/mtab

ok, your windows partition is not mounted.
try as root
mount /mnt/windows

what actually happened to hda6 thru 8?