R: I need Help RedHat-Windows XP

[Chris Hewitt]

On Sat, 2005-04-30 at 03:39, Roberto wrote:
> Thank you very much for your reply.
> I've just tried the  commands you told me to use in the last part of you
> reply, but nothing seems to be changed.
> In fact windows xp crashes with a blue screen that say that Session Manager
> Initialization has stopped in un unattended way, and so the system has been
> closed.
> In these conditions I really can do nothing, I am not able to reinstall
> windows without erasing its partition and with that all my important data.
> It's for this reason I asked you for a way to recover and save my Windows
> files from Linux, that is now the only os I can start.
> Thank you again

Roberto,

Without installing support for it, Linux cannot read the NTFS filesystem
that a modern MS Windows uses. Microsoft do not give out the details, so
the support under Linux is effectively reverse-engineered and not as
good as we would like.

Do you have another computer running MS Windows? If so, what I would do
is to take out the disc drive and put it as a second drive into the
other computer. MS Windows will recognise this as a data drive and you
can back up your files. Then you can re-install both MS Windows and
Linux following Rick's good advice.

Alternatively, there are recovery utilities that come with MS Windows.
You would need to look up how to use these.

Almost certainly, there is no damage to your MS Windows installation, it
is just that it is not booting properly. This is probably because the
settings in the Linux boot loader (called grub) are not quite correct
for your particular MS Windows installation. I dual boot with MS Windows
2000 but XP behaves somewhat differently, but if under Linux you can do
these commands as root and send us the output I'm sure people on this
list can help. Do "less /boot/grub/grub.conf" (you can scroll up and
down with the arrow keys and "q" will quit). This file shows how it is
trying to boot. Also run "fdisk -l" (this gives the partition
information for your hard disc).

When installing any operating system it is a very good idea to have any
existing important files backed up first.

Hope this helps.

Chris