XP won't boot, loops back to GRUB: dual-boot XP and Ubuntu
 

I am trying to load Ubuntu Feisty Fawn on my laptop for the first time. I would like to dual-boot with XP to make the transition smoother. I got extremely close, both Operating Systems installed and both appeared in the GRUB menu. But only Ubuntu would boot. XP on the other hand would get to the blue startup screen, and right before it shows the user accounts, the screen would go black and the GRUB menu appeared again. No error messages or anything. I looked for other solutions, and found a number of them, but none of them that I found had exactly my problem, so none of the solutions worked. I finally went back to the Windows MBR and the same thing happened. At that point I wiped my hard drive clean again and started over.

Now I have XP installed and its working fine, but I'm eager to get the dual-boot working. If anyone knows a solution for this problem, I'd appreciate the help.

Do a scandisk first before trying again.

Load Ubuntu again. If it does it again then navigate to boot/grub/grub.conf (that is where the file is located in Fedora). Open that file and ensure it is looking for Windows in the right place. Normally if you only have Windows on your box it will be located in the first partition on the first drive (hd0,1). This is not always the case so sometime you have to tell GRUB to look somewhere else. In the grub.conf file you should see an entry similar to the one below. If not then make it so and try again. If it still doesn't work then post your partition layout here for us to see. Your Ubuntu should come with QTparted, Gparted or something like that. On Fedora its under "System Tools". Open it up, click on your hard drive to expand it and then post the result here. Don't start over again...just point your web browser back here and everyone will walk you through it.

Grub's default guess....

title Other
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

.

Jay

I think you should just go ahead and install Ubuntu in the free space and put the boot loader in the MBR of the drive, either /dev/hda for a PATA drive or /dev/sda for a SATA drive. The problem you encountered has nothing to do with Linux or grub based on the symptoms you described. It appears Windows booted fine but could not log you in, this is a Windows specific issue. If Windows is fine now after the reinstallation, everything should be cool.

I reinstalled ubuntu and the dual-boot works fine now. Hopefully it will stay that way. I thought I followed the exact same process last time. But oh well. Thanks for your help.