Re: Grub issues booting Win xp
See below...
Kevin Börgens wrote:
>
> Hi
>
> I try to get my grub to boot my windows xp. I know that there is the
> possibility to do it the other way round and let the windows boot menu start
> grub. But I want to xp to be directly integrated into the grub menu.
>
> The situation:
>
> It all started with a strange xp installation. the first 10gb of the disk were
> made an fat32 partition and the rest was made a extended partition with a
> ntfs partition in it. I installed xp on the latter one.
Windows always has to boot from a primary partition. So it's boot files
(such as boot.ini, ntldr etc. will always be there, even though the bulk
of the OS can reside on a logical volume inside an extended partition.
So even though you "installed" Windows to the NTFS partition, it's boot
files were on that FAT32 primary, which is how it booted.
>
> then I installed debian sarge. i deleted the fat partition and used the space
> for a ext3 and a swap partition.
That's where your Windows boot files went....you deleted the partition
they were on. It can't boot from just the NTFS logical partition - it
needs a primary to start from with the boot files on it, and boot.ini
has to point to the NTFS partition with it's partition(x) value.
It probably can be fixed with a few manipulations, and by using the
fixboot command from the recovery console - but I'm not sure of the
details, never having tried it myself. But it would need a primary
partition to work with for starters. If I had a similar installation, I
would try it for you, but no such luck. Someone experienced with this
type of recovery may be able to help though.
But the problem isn't with GRUB, and it also has nothing to do with the
MBR. The problem is that you deleted the partition that Windows was
booting from.
Tom
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