How to recover for booting Windows CD and Windows partitions?

[Bob McClure Jr]

On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 06:47:33PM +0800, Andrew Tsang wrote:
> I original have 3 Windows XP (different languages) respectively in
> partition hda1 (1st partition), hda3, and hda4. Partition hda2 was
> empty.

So you had primary partitions 1, 3, and 4.  Was all the hard disk
covered by those three?

> I then repartitioned hda2 to become 3 consecutive partitions &
> the previous partition hda3 & hda4 became hda5 and hda6 but there was no
> change with the actual disk location where the 3 Windows partitions
> resided.

Ok, now I'm unclear.  Is hda2 an extended partition covering the space
formerly owned by hda3 and 4, and what else?

What became of the entries for hda3 and hda4?

What else does hda2 cover?

> Then I installed Red Hat Linux with /boot in hda2,

That won't work if hda2 is an extended partition.

> swap in hda3
> & / in hda4. I used Grub to configure for multiple boot during the
> installation. After installation (without error), I was able to boot
> Linux and Windows XP of hda1 (the 1st partition). But when I booted the
> Windows XP of either partition hda5 or hda6, booting failed and the
> following error message was displayed:
>  
> "The following file is damaged or missing, unable to boot Windows:
> <Windows root>\system32\hal.dll ...."
>  
> I tried to recover from the Windows XP installation CD, but I was unable
> to boot the CD (booting of the CD works on another PC). When the PC
> displayed "Hit any key to boot from CD ..", I hit ENTER and it displayed
> "Setup is inspecting your hardware configuration", then screen blanked
> and the PC hung. I needed to reset the PC and the same process repeated.
> Booting of the Linux installation CD is fine. Note that the Windows XP
> installation CDs booted well before the Linux installation.
>  
> How can I recover the boot record (or something else) so that I can boot
> from the Windows Installation CD as well as the 2 Windows XP in
> partition hda5 & hda6?
>  
>  
> --Andrew Tsang

Could you please post your current partition table?  That would help
me.

Cheers,
-- 
Bob McClure, Jr.             Bobcat Open Systems, Inc.
robertmcclure at earthlink.net  http://www.bobcatos.com
God is more interested in our availability than our ability.