well, I figured it out myself.. here is menu.lst entry for winxp that works fine here in case someone needs it: title Microsoft Windows XP Professional rootnoverify (hd1,0) map (hd0) (hd1) map (hd1) (hd0) chainloader +1 I suspect the 'makeactive' command might have something to do with the 'grub error 17'.. (maybe it changed Debian MBR )