I had windows xp sp2 on my machine. All the partitions in windows are NTFS. Later i installed Fedora Core 9. FC9 just works fine. But When i select Windows Xp on Grub Boot loader, i am getting a blank screen, nothing more than that.

I reinstalled the grub also. But it didn't resolve my issue. I tried to recover windows xp with Windows XP Recovery Console. When i try to boot from windows xp CD, i get "Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration" message. After this message, i am getting the same blank screen. It's not moving to next section.

I'm sure that there is no problem with my hardware.

Then i deleted MBR (including partition table) after taking a backup of linux boot disk. Now i'm able to boot from windows Xp CDRoM. In the recovery console, i tried fixmbr and fixboot, but no use, becoz there is no partition table available on the disk.

I don't know how to boot windows xp with out re-installing it.

- Jagadish

If did delete the partition, your are dead. You will have to repartition and re-install everything.

The good news is Linux will re-install quickly, the bad news is you can expect about a four hour job to re-install XP with all the updates ( assuming you have a fast internet connection). BTW SP3 is out... more time, I know all too well, it took me about 10 hours to restore XP on my kids machine after another windoze screw up. You will spend lots of time re-installing all your apps as well.

Well this is what I did b 4 i deleted anything, I had a hell of a timje doing it but after a day i got it done.

I initially had acronis operating system selector installed, my mouse kept jumping around when i was trying to delete Mandriva 2008 PowerPack from the utility and 'ass'idently removed the dang windowsxp 64 bit icon instead. Well I'll be a SOB if I couldnt do anything at that point (><) I was ticked off dude!

I had to load grub bootloader on primary raid0 and boot into safe mode from grub cause winxp 64 would not generate in acronis even after using the wizard to detect Operating Systems and uninstalled acronis oss from safe mode

after multiple tries of reinstalling mdv 2008 with custom partitioning( so I could make root 20GB's instead of default 8GB's for all My updates) for my secondary raid, i just decided to say "pi** on it" and treid to boot into windows using grubs graphical interface, well.... it worked but only 1 problem, i had no idea what to do at that point after it booted and i had a black screen but i had sound, I thought What the Heck is this crap

So... i sat and thought awhile and decided that i would boot back into safe mode on windows and uninstall nvidia display drvrs only and that worked

then i reinstalled nvidia drivers for my dual 8800's and all is fine now, 1 downfall is i decided to stick with grubs grapical bootloader instead of fdisk/mbr

Hey if it aint broke dont fix eh?

This story seems to be short in detail but assure You it seemed a liftime w/o COD4 at My fingertips

I know this does not really address the issue at hand but i thought that if it ever happened to You again maybe this info would help, maybe some insight on other avenues if Your system is mess up, linux always seems to be good rescue media when it comes to Windows as far as Im concerned

I did fail to mention in 1 of those paragraphs that i severely messed up something in winxp 64 cause i had no taskbar in safe mode, I fix that problem by cntrl-alt-delete to get to task manager and got into msconfig from starting a new process and did the system restore thingy 8) Woo Hoo

A Gold Star for JohnnyBob

I have the exact same problem, but I didn't delete or touch anything yet. Think you could help?

Geostegma,

We can help. It is best to start a new thread. Using this one is high jacking, and if the original poster has more concerns, it makes a big mess to keep things straight.

Anyway, post the problem, I know you said 'the exact same'. Please include, the type of hardware, distro, windoze stuff etc. I need to know what you have done to resolve the problem so far, and what symptoms you now have.

I had had exactly the same problem. Looks like a 32-bit windows XP installer just needs the first 8MB unpartitioned on disk. So, I've fixed that by using a partition manager that is capable to safely resize partitions (not destroying disk data). I decreased the size of the first partition by 8MB freeing the space in front of it. After that the installer booted fine and I was able to install XP with no problems. And I kept my Fedora installation intact as well

Thanx,
Vax.