How to recover for booting Windows CD and Windows partitions?

[Rick Stevens]

Andrew Tsang wrote:
>>>Andrew Tsang wrote: 
>>>I've figured out the problem of booting the 2 WinXP at the last 2
>>>partitions. Since the partition numbers of these 2 WinXP had
> 
> increased
> 
>>>by 2 after I created the Linux partitions, changing c:\boot.ini to
> 
> make
> 
>>>the 2 corresponding boot entries referencing the new partition
> 
> numbers
> 
>>>resolves the problem. However, I am still unable to boot from any
> 
> WinXP
> 
>>>Installation CD.
>>
>>Rick Stevens wrote:
>>We prefer bottom posting here, Andrew.  Please try to comply if you
> 
> can.
> 
>>
>>You have to set your BIOS to try to boot the CD BEFORE the hard drive.
>>I typically have the boot order set to:
>>
>>
>>    floppy
>>    CD/DVD
>>    USB flash drive
>>    hard drive
>>
>>
>>The idea is to have the system try removable media first before the
>>hard disk.
>>
>>
> 
> 
> My BIOS was always set to boot CD first then Hard Drive, otherwise I
> would not be able to boot CD for installing my WinXPs & Linux. Seems
> booting of the WinXP installation CD depends on certain information on
> the hard drive during the initial stage & such information was
> overwritten by the Linux installation or Grub. I've tried swapping with
> another hard drive to test out my WinXP installation CD media & it works
> fine. My question is how I could recover such information so that I can
> boot from WinXP installation CD again without affecting all bootable
> partitions (including Linux).

If you have a bootable CD in the drive AND the computer tries the CD
first, it shouldn't matter what the hard drive has on it--the CD should
boot.  XP does have certain requirements regarding the manner in which
it boots from the hard drive (XP must be in a primary partition), but
the CD should boot regardless.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-      The moving cursor writes, and having written, blinks on.      -
----------------------------------------------------------------------