Re: dual booting computer sheddies to the bridge

Ron(UK) wrote:
I`m getting there, I added

title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd1.0)
chainloader+1

cribbed from Dr Ivans post

This gives me a WinXP entry in the grub loader, but it doesn`t work, just flickers the screen

Apple lodgies, but this is going to get <ahem> a little bit technical </ahem>. Sig at 11.

When XP boots, it reads a file called c:\boot.ini, which tells XP where to start running from. If this file has more than one entry, you get a boot menu when starting XP. When you moved the XP disk so grub boots, that also molishs the XP boot.ini entries wrong, so they need to be changed to match the new location of the XP disk.

One of mine looks like this when you open it in a text editor:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /usepmtimer

You can either modify these manually so that the numbers in your equivalent of the "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)" bit are correct, or go through some hoops to persuade XP to molish a correct one for you.

Fortunately, a trial and error approach is available, whereby you add lots of extra lines with all the combinations of numbers you think might work, then try them one by one. Moving the XP disk will most likely cause at least one of the 0's to need to be a 1, and maybe other things too depending on what moved where. Your first exercise though is to copy and paste the last line so it appears twice, change the quoted text so the two lines are different, and see if you are getting an XP boot menu with at least two choices on it, one of them being your modified text, because if you don't see this then your grub boot line is not correctly starting the XP bootloader.

The automated approach using fixboot will probably toast grub (yech - the thought!).

--
JimP
I told you so.
.

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