Sarge Test Candidate 1 broke WinXP on my triple-boot i386
Until last night I had an i386 triple-boot system with
Win98, WinXP, and Mandrake. LILO in the MBR would
boot either Linux or the NT boot loader (which LILO
labeled "Windows"), which lived in the first partition
I believe. The NT boot loader would then boot either
Win98, in the FAT32 first partition (C:), or WinXP, in
the NTFS second partition (D:).
Last night I installed Debian sarge Test Candidate 1
net installer. Everything seemed to go fine. I
deleted the Mandrake partitions and allowed the
installer to automatically create the Debian
partitions in the newly freed space. The GRUB install
said I had one other OS, "Windows NT/2000/XP", which I
assume meant the NT boot loader in the first
partition.
When the system rebooted I did not immediately boot
Debian to continue the install. Instead, I asked GRUB
to boot Windows, which correctly booted the NT boot
loader. When I asked the NT boot loader to boot
WinXP, however, XP errored out with a message saying
that <Windows root>\system32\hal.dll was missing or
corrupt. (Oddly, Win98 still boots fine from the NT
boot loader.)
I find it hard to believe that the Debian installer
really did trash my system32\hal.dll file. In fact, I
used the XP install disk's "recovery console" (i.e.
DOS) to look for the file, and it's still there. The
XP partition (D:, NTFS) as a whole looks just fine.
Another possibility is that the NT boot loader was
damaged and it's now looking in the wrong place for
XP. But why does it still boot Win98, then?
Very odd. And very annoying, because the only way I
know to fix it is to reinstall XP, after first copying
everything I care about from the XP partition to the
Win98 partition using DOS. I suspect that all I
really need to do is repair the NT boot loader, but I
have no idea how.
Further, my efforts at repairing XP have somehow
removed GRUB, so the system now boots straight to the
NT boot loader, so even if I fix XP, I'll need to
reinstall Debian, which will presumably nuke XP again!
Any help very much appreciated.
Franz Amador
fgamador@yahoo.com
Reply to: