Booting MDK and windows XP on a laptop problems

[Guest gmontag]

I am having problems with my laptop. When installing MDK and installing lilo I decided to switch to grub using the control panel. After booting Grub would not boot. Used the cd to reinstall grub and that would not work. Used the cd to reinstall Windows bootloader and that would not work. Used the win xp recovery console from XP cd and ran fixmbr and fixboot ( which said it was fixing drive E). I now get an error message about no ntldr. I reinstall mdk 9.0 leaving the windows xp partition alone. I can get into mdk but it did not recognize my windows partition. The windows partition is ntfs. I am hoping I can repair the windows from mdk 9.2. Are there any good ntfs partition read write tools for linux out there yet.

my partions are as follows

/mbr/ntfs/boot/()ext3swap

How would I add an entry to grub.conf to boot the ntfs partition and Mount the ntldr.?

I am not that familiar with fixboot and what that did to the ntldr.

[fuzzylizard]

I do believe you are screwed.

 

However, the best thing to do in this situation is to reinstall windows XP. Try to use the rescue options on the installer CD, if that does not work, then try to do a full intall.

 

There is a little known option in the 2000/XP install CD that if you select to do a full install and the cd can find an existing installation on the hard drive, it will give you the option to repair that installation. This will basically go through a full install (so you will have to reinstall all updates and service packs), but it will do it into the existing windows directory and will attempt to keep the registry intact. Although, you may have to reinstall a lot of the programs on your computer afterwards. It will also repair the mbr.

 

It is a little scary to watch, but it does work. I have had to do it several times on several different computers.

 

Once you have windows up and running then you can try and repair or reinstall Linux.

 

good luck

[bvc]

not good I had

win98/win2k/ML9.1/swap/Debian/unallocated/share

I backed up /share, used diskdrake to delete /share to make share bigger using the unallocated space. I could then boot to all OS's except win98. So, fixmbr...didn't do it. Fixboot...didn't do it, and gave me the same

no ntldr

 

Suposedly there's a file you can replace, but I think there's more to it than that. I do not recall the details, but after a lot of googling I found all the files to be there, from Debian. I think the message should be more like

corrupt ntldr

because it wasn't finding something and I gave up figuring out what and reinstalled win98, and win2k, AFTER trying ALL the repair options including the one fuzzylizard mentioned. Win2k said the registry was corrupt beyond repair and to reinstall win2k.

 

There was another instance where I switch from lilo to grub, I thought like I always did, but then realized I installed grub to hda1 instead of hda, and could no longer boot to win98.

 

I now have 2 pc's. When I had one, I had 2 hd's, and no probs. Soon I will be getting another hd, because lin and win just don't live happily together.

[Qchem]

It didn't by any chance complain about a missing ntkrnl.exe did it?? I've had this problem before which stemed from a bootloader. The trick was to change the win boot.ini to repoint to the correct partition.

[Guest gmontag]

Well my problem stemmed from me being to savy for my own good. I wanted to try Mandrake and backed up my Redhat partion to windows using partition image. I then installed Mandrake. Resintalled the Redhat. Partion image automatically hides and deactivates the partition. Windows does not tell any intelligible errors although mdk and rehat could still see the windows partition. I was able to use some emergencey disk to reacitvate the partiion and fix the mbr for windows. Then used the mdk disk1 in rescue to reinstall lilo and I have a working dual boot system.