Dual boot Kubuntu and XP on separate hard drives, some help please.

[Qqmike]

Re: Dual boot Kubuntu and XP on separate hard drives, some help please.

"Can i just do the GRUB reinstall from my HDD installation of Kubuntu?"

Yes, you can. I forgot that you can boot into Kubuntu now.


"How would my boot.ini be corrupt though, because when I had Windows solely on this machine I never had a problem booting, only received the error after installing Kubuntu."

I don't know. In 2 years of GRUB work, this is the first time I heard of it. It has nothing to do with installing Kubuntu, though. Absolute WORST case: GRUB overwrites the MBR and so kills NTLDR, but that is *restricted* to just the first 512 bytes of the disk! -- the first sector, just the IPL + Partition table + end signature.
So some of this Windows Recovery installs may have tripped it, I don't know.

[Qqmike]

Re: Dual boot Kubuntu and XP on separate hard drives, some help please.

Regarding the Live CD not getting GUI:

it may help to completely shut down your machine, pull the plug, let it rest a few minutes, and then start it back up and see if the Live CD works again (it did work before); my lay-theory is that the ramdisk gets corrupted => all the prescriptions you hear for shutting down the machine to restore/clean out.

[madmanmick]

Re: Dual boot Kubuntu and XP on separate hard drives, some help please.

Ok first thing I will do is run the GRUB setup. If that fails, I think it may result in Error 17. If not, I will try booting XP, and Kubuntu. If either fail, then I must do a fixmbr/fixboot. IF kubuntu works and XP doesn't, I will run a bootcfg /rebuild to try and fix the boot.ini. Will keep you posted.

[Qqmike]

Re: Dual boot Kubuntu and XP on separate hard drives, some help please.

OK.

[Qqmike]

Re: Dual boot Kubuntu and XP on separate hard drives, some help please.

Hmm, it's been awhile. Sounds like you may have encountered a problem. I will check back again later (uncertain when), but for now, I'll drop this brief review, just to be sure we are on the same page:

To review,
you have two hard drives (and the data drive):
hd0 is Windows on (hd0,0)
and hd1 is for Kubuntu (on partition (hd1,y?).
(And you are sure about the naming hd0 and hd1. In particular, Windows is hd0 and is set in BIOS to be the first in drive boot order, and so the PC boots from Windows drive = hd0.)
We installed and re-installed GRUB to the MBR of hd0 from the GRUB files in the Kubuntu root partition:
grub> root (hd1,y?)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> quit
The menu.lst file in Kubuntu (on (hd1,y?)) has a boot entry for Windows as follows:
title Windows
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

What, really, can go wrong with this?

This is Windows XP (or other), not Vista (if it were Vista, we'd use not root (hd0,0), but instead rootnoverify (hd0,0)).

[madmanmick]

Re: Dual boot Kubuntu and XP on separate hard drives, some help please.

Sorry I have been at uni, I just got back so I'm going to run the GRUB setup now.

[madmanmick]

Re: Dual boot Kubuntu and XP on separate hard drives, some help please.

Ok, i did a GRUB reinstall to hd0, and the same thing happens. I can boot into kubuntu, but XP gives me the missing HAL32.dll problem. Im going to try running the bootcfg /rebuild now. Hopefully that will work.

[madmanmick]

Re: Dual boot Kubuntu and XP on separate hard drives, some help please.

UPDATE: I ran the XP recovery disk and attempted to do a bootcfg /rebuild, but it gave me an error saying it could not detect any installed versions of Windows XP. Which is BS because I know it is still sitting on that hard drive. I have no idea what to do, I'm stumped. I might have to run a FIXMBR and nuke Kubuntu, and go back to Windows for the time being... unless you can think of something else I can do to fix it?

[Qqmike]

Re: Dual boot Kubuntu and XP on separate hard drives, some help please.

Let's hope you didn't accidentally install Kubuntu over XP somehow; I rather doubt that in your case, but smarter folks than you & I have done it.


And, as I said, if you google on
Missing file Hal32.dll
all sorts of stuff comes up, including a lot of baffled, unhappy Windows users.


You might try to set up the Kubuntu drive as the first boot drive in BIOS, so the Kubuntu drive will be hd0 and the Windows drive will be hd1. That's usually backwards of how Windows prefers to be, but it's how some folks do it. Then in Kubuntu's menu.lst for XP it would read:

title XP
root (hd1,0)
map (hd1) (hd0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
chainloader +1

And GRUB must be setup to the MBR of hd1:
grub> root (hd1,y)
grub> setup (hd1)
grub> quit

where (hd1,y) is the answer to
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1

Who knows, given all the other unusual behavior here, that may well work
BTW, it does no harm to install GRUB in more than one place; e.g., to the root partition (which would be setup (hdx,y)), and to any and all MBR's.

GRUB is quite cooperative, certainly so compared to Windows bootloaders & config files. You CAN (ie, it is possible to) boot Kubuntu FROM the Windows bootloader (edit boot.ini), but that's not my thing.

No question that Hal32.dll got damaged somehow (not by the GRUB install to the first sector, though). The google might help with that. I have heard there are places to download all the dll files.

Let us know, and good luck with this. I dual boot XP on two hard drives with *several* Linux OSs (and even with OSs on flash drives and Kubuntus on a 3rd external USB HDD), booting OSs(including XP) from and to every device, all using GRUB, with no problems. So, this is a bit of a mystery.

Perhaps others might have a thought. Try using Kubuntu as the first-boot drive ... Good luck.

[Qqmike]

Re: Dual boot Kubuntu and XP on separate hard drives, some help please.

In your early attempts/experiments, if you accidentally did a GRUB command like
grub> setup (hdx,y)
and if (hdx,y) was the XP partition (where its boot sector is also located), THEN that could mess up the basic XP boot sector files, which may be where this dll business is coming from.
We never write GRUB to the XP partition; GRUB is written only to the MBR of the XP hard drive.
Just an fyi, based on a quick re-reading of this thread.

[madmanmick]

Re: Dual boot Kubuntu and XP on separate hard drives, some help please.

Yeh I tried mounting my Kubuntu drive as hd0 but then nothing worked at all, so it was XP drive or nothing. Unfortunately I do still have applications on XP i need to use, so I had to wipe the MBR and boot solely in XP. I will keep trying, but for now I am just going to have to stick with XP unfortunately.

[dibl]

Re: Dual boot Kubuntu and XP on separate hard drives, some help please.

Unfortunately I do still have applications on XP i need to use

I'm in the same situation, but for over 1 year I have not had a native Win XP installation on my computer. I run XP and my application in a VMWare Player virtual machine, on the Linux system. If you ever get thoroughly sick of dealing with Microsoft and Windows viruses and malware, you might want to check it out. Also folks are saying very positive things about Virtual Box, which is another popular virtual platform for Linux.

p.s. The last time I needed to call 1-800-microsoft to get a "key" number, to reinstall my Win XP after a virus-crash, they told me I'm only allowed to have 2 hard drives in my computer, or else I have to buy a server license. Today, I have 5 hard drives, no viruses, and no phone calls to anyone for permission to do anything.