[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Windows won't boot!

Gregory Seidman wrote:


By installing Sarge I have somehow rendered my friend's Windows system
unbootable. The original configuration was two 200GB drives, hda and hdb.
Windows XP was on hda and the other drive was apparently empty.

I repartitioned hdb as part of the Sarge install, removing the unused NTFS
partition and replacing it with root (ext3), swap, home (ext3), and vfat
partitions. I had the installer use LILO, and when it rebooted into
base-config everything appeared to be fine.

I then altered the /etc/lilo.conf to make sure that it was installing on
/dev/hda but using /dev/hdb1 as root. It seemed happy with this and
installed on the MBR of /dev/hda without difficulty. After installing and
configuring lots of packages, I decided to reboot to Windows and leave it
at that for the time being. Windows would boot part of the way, then
complain about a missing AUTOCHK or something and immediately reboot. So I
tried booting to Linux, and it couldn't find the root partition. I managed
to boot by explicitly giving root=/dev/hdb1 on the LILO prompt, but there
does not seem to be any way to get Windows to boot.

Has anyone run into anything like this? Does anyone know how to fix it? At
this point I'd be happy enough not to be able to boot to Linux at all, just
get things back to where booting the computer brings up Windows. Please
help.

--Greg
Dollars to doughnuts Windoze was using hdb for something and not letting on. Windows has a nasty habit of doing this -- for example using any apparently unused area of any disk for its own purposes, eg swap, user-silently (there's probably a log of what it's doing somewhere, but not anywhere the average user can easily find it).
When installing Linux dual-boot on a machine that already runs Linux, one of the golden rules is Don't boot Windows between adding the second disk and partitioning the second disk with Linux's fdisk. If you let Windows see that the second disk is there and not all the space is used, it will do this kind of thing. You mentioned there was an NTFS partition on hdb which you removed -- more evidence that Windows was using the disk on the quiet.
Windows is not quite arrogant enough to snatch non-Windows partitions back, so letting Windows see the disk once it's fully partitioned with Linux partitions is fine. But a disk that appears to have unpartitioned space when Windows see it won't be left alone long...
As to how to fix it... don't have much to add to the other posters' ideas. You probably don't want to hear this, but a re-install looks to me like it's in your near future... 

Mark
Reply to: