Here's the story, in more detail, for the archives. I rewrote the relevant stanza of /boot/grub/menu.lst to read # This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS # on /dev/hdb1, "map" lines added by hand. title Windows XP map (hd0) (hd1) map (hd1) (hd0) root (hd1,0) savedefault chainloader +1 I then rebooted into Windows XP. It went _directly_ to "Windows XP Professional Setup," without asking permission (of course), deleted a slew of files and copied a bunch more to hard disk. While this was going on, I was thinking, Let it do what it wants, since it's really on hdb, thinking its on C:. When it was done, it rebooted into grub! And my sid installation is still there! Hurrah! So I booted back into Windows, and this time was in the regular Windows XP Pro Setup, which claimed "Installing Windows" supposedly "to complete in 39 minutes." It took less than 15. Rebooted again, and found I had choices: back to the installer, or two identical lines reading "Microsoft Windows XP Professional." The first one produces a brand new installation of XP, complete with request to register it with Micro$oft. But the second line provides my whole old installation, even IBM Client Security! Half an hour of checking suggests everything still works. Whew! Is this a great list, or what?! And particularly, thanks Dave!
Glad to be of some help. And, _yes_, 'debian-user' is great, even when it goes OT. (And I don't mean overtime... I mean stuff about broccoli, etc.)
I'm glad it worked out for you. I don't really understand what you did: you said you changed 'menu.lst', rebooted, and found that WinXP was working. Everything after that sounded a lot like you were doing repairs using a WinXP CD, though. Is that true? I any case, it sounds like you dodged the bullet this time. (Shall we call you "Neo," or what? :) If you are getting Win XP to offer boot choices AFTER you boot to Windows with GRUB, then you may get tired of it and want to reconfigure WinXP so that it doesn't do that any more. I'm getting off topic for a Debian list, but you are a Debian user so I guess we can afford to give you some slack. You can go to
Start -> Control Panel -> Performance and Maintenance -> System
from there choose
Advanced -> Startup and Recovery: Settings
Then look for:
"To edit the startup options file manually, click edit"
If you do this you may be in somewhat dangerous territory. I'm not
really sure what has happened with your machine -- it sounds like
Windows moved your previous system to a new "folder" and installed
itself into a fresh one. Normally, this file is used to select
different OSes on different partitions to boot from; it is the WinXP
equivalent of GRUB's 'menu.lst' file. It can also be used to setup
different boot configurations on the same partition.
You probably want to backup this file before you edit it. It is
usually here:
C:\BOOT.INITo get at it you may have to alter its file attributes using ATTRIB from the command prompt. Now, if the lines in this file under "[operating systems]" indicate different values for "rdisk()", then BOOT.INI is actually booting different versions of WinXP from different partitions. On the other hand, if the lines seem identical except for the "folder" at the very end, then you have more than one version of WinXP installed on the same partition. If that is the case, and you don't want the choice of booting to your original WinXP and a new, clean install, you can remove the line to the clean install... and you can erase the folder that contains the clean install if you boot to your original version of WinXP. A second install will just waste drive space, and it may not recognize any of your installed programs anyway.
I offer this FYI, since it reminds me very much of a problem I helped a student with recently who had installed WinXP over top of a pre-existing Win2K partition and ended up with a very similar set of boot choices from XP's boot loader (NTLDR).
My apologies to the rest of the 'debian-user' community who feel that offering help regarding a competing OS is inappropriate. I do not fear Microshaft and it's current near-monopoly over the OS market; indeed, I have actually begun to feel sorry for it because it's demise is as inevitable as it is appropriate. I also feel that by helping newbies to multiboot until they're ready to make a permanent switch to Debian (or some other Linux... or even joining the Hurd!) it makes people feel like their welcome to join a community instead of some sort of tribal feud between advocates of alternative bit-collections.
Dave W.