Dual boot WinXP repair (maybe a little OT)

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Thu, 2009-03-05 at 02:06 +0000, Dave Bolt IT Solutions wrote:
> Well, I can't help much with the repair at this point, but I wander why you 
> moved the XP partition.

As I said elsewhere, I did it without thinking, from the days when /boot
needed to be in the first 1024 cylinders on the disk.  The WinXP
partition is pretty big.

> When I first installed Fedora (core 8), I first installed XP since Microsoft 
> don't like to share with other OS's, into a partition at the beginning of 
> the first drive, leaving a second partition to be used mostly for storage. I 
> then installed Fedora (in my case on a second drive), and used the Fedora 
> installar's recomendations of where to put it's boot sector and whatever 
> else, and it just took care of the details.
> Now, in your case, XP has been installed as the first partition on the 
> drive, then moved. Unfortunately, I think you will find that if you do get 
> XP to boot, it will still think it is on the first partition, so will not 
> run very well, if at all.
> Reinstalling over XP may fix this without loosing most of the install, 
> although I think wiping and starting again will actually take less time. 
> (The repair install tends to check each file that is already on the drive, 
> instead of just writing new files, as far as I can tell).

I'm thinking of jiggering the partitions to put WinXP first again
and /boot second.  I know how to fix the Linux side when I do that, so
maybe putting WinXP back will help.  I'd rather not re-install because I
installed a bunch of stuff on Win before I did this, so it would be
annoying (not to say awful) to have to do that all over again.


> Regards
> Dave 
> 
> 
> 
-- 
                Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs