XP + FC1 = sorrow

[speedbump]

Hi all-

I've been reading every 'Fedora broke my XP' thread, and am at wits end, because I'm essentially in the same boat. I have the following configuration:

ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe mobo, 2.8Ghz Pentium with hyperthreading enabled
1 Gig RAM
/dev/hda is Maxtor 60Gig IDE
/dev/sda and /dev/sdb are Seagate 120Gig SATA drives
no floppy drive
Pioneer A05 DVD burner
Matrox P750 video card, can do up to triple head(!), but I have two displays now

I had XP SP1 in an NTFS partition on /dev/hda, using the whole drive. I can't use the SATA drives because they are dedicated to video editing, and I need ALL that space. So, I booted Knoppix 3.4 (nice distro) and used ntfsresize to change my NTFS partition to 50Gigs, with 10Gigs of space intended for FC1.

The problems: I am able to boot XP if there are no other partitions defined on /dev/hda. If I create new partitions by Knoppix fdisk, XP fails to boot. I installed FC1 and Grub in the MBR, and at first neither would boot. Geometry bug? I found a thread which talks about using sfdisk to rewrite the geometry to something 'sane' that XP will believe. That doesn't get XP booting, but at least I can boot FC1, which is what I'm typing from now. XP is on partition 1, and FC1 is partitions 2-4, so it is not a 1023 cyl issue with this BIOS.

My Winblows XP CD will NOT boot beyond the initial 'setup is examing your config' message if there are any unapproved partition types on /dev/hda, which means I can't do the FIXBOOT/FIXMBR trick. What's up with THAT??!!!! This is all very frustrating.

I'm not sure what to do now. I can boot FC1, but if I pick XP from Grub, I get the 'rootnoverify hda(0,0), chainloader +1' message and the system hangs. I have examined the grub.conf file and it looks correct. I have partimage backups of my XP partition, so I can delete and restore it, but I'd rather not rebuild XP from scratch. I've been reinstalling for the last five days or so and I'm really getting tired of all this trouble.

Any suggestions?

My thoughts at this point are to try this:

1) Back up my FC1 partitions with tar
2) Boot to Linux Rescue, delete FC1 partitions with fdisk
3) dd the saved XP MBR back to /dev/hda, or try to get the XP recovery console to FIXMBR
4) Verify Xp will boot
5) Create NTFS partitions of similar sizes to FC1 with XP's diskpart
6) Boot Linux Rescue, change the file types of the partitions with fdisk, restore tar files, and do a grub-install
7) Do a happy dance if all this works

My thought is that if I have XP define partitions, rather than fdisk, then XP will be happy with the geometry. fdisk will have to be used to change the partitions types, but I don't think that will botch the partition table significantly.

[Jman]

Are you sure of that Windows grub entry? If it is on hda1, the grub.conf entry would look something like this:

title Windows
        rootnoverify (hd0,0)
        chainloader +1

I would double check this before anything else, as you already got grub to work.

[speedbump]

Grub looks correct to me. The /boot for FC1 is /dev/hda2

The XP partition is the first one on /dev/hda.

Here's my grub.conf file:
#boot=/dev/hda
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Fedora Core (2.4.22-1.2115.nptlsmp)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.22-1.2115.nptlsmp ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi rhgb
initrd /initrd-2.4.22-1.2115.nptlsmp.img
title Fedora Core-up (2.4.22-1.2115.nptl)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi rhgb
initrd /initrd-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl.img
title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

[David]

I think the dual boot bug was with fc2, wasn't it?

I had a similar problem to the one you're describing and it turned out that I had the wrong partition set as active. The partition that contains your MBR must be active. Here's the solution I came up with, copied from this thread:

First I loaded grub then performed the command makeactive (hd0,0);
then I restarted to see if anything had changed in grub by selecting windows again. This time it came up with an error message instead of returning to the original screen so, thinking that the correct partition must now be active, I used fixboot and fixmbr commands in windows repair prompt (accessed from the insallation cd-rom);
then I reinstalled grub to hda as per Manny's instructions.

[speedbump]

No joy. Here's my fdisk -l /dev/hda output:

Disk /dev/hda: 61.4 GB, 61492838400 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7476 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 6092 48926272+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 * 6092 6104 102312 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 6104 6232 1024128 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda4 6232 7477 9998856 83 Linux

/dev/hda2 is the /boot partition. I still get the 'rootnoverify' message then a hang when I try to boot XP from Grub.

[speedbump]

Well, I finally got tired of faffing around with this problem. I reinstalled Windows XP and FC1 from scratch, and it worked this time; all operating systems boot without error.

I think the problem has been that I used Knoppix 3.4 and ntfsresize to shrink my original NTFS partition to make room for FC1, but after that XP never really believed the partition table and refused to boot. I suspect fdisk, or at least Knoppix's version of it.

This has been the worst install of my life, and I've been in the computing business for over twenty years, so I'm certainly no newbie who doesn't know what a partition is. Trying to get FC1 and XP to play together nicely was worse than when I was building Sun 3/60 workstations, or even when I was trying to get Novell networking to run on DOS. Gaaaahh!