Can't boot WinXP but Kubuntu sees it

[mgurak]

Hi all. I recently installed Kubuntu Netbook Remix 10.04 on an Asus EEE 1050HA netbook. At first my wireless adapter wasn't being recognized so I tried to boot from the Live CD with no joy. Then I accidentally booted into the recovery partition thinking it might be my CD. I got the Grub console.

My WinXP and recovery partitions were recognized fine but the Kubuntu partitions weren't. So I just reinstalled Kubuntu and told it to leave the Win partitions alone. That worked; I have a good version of Kubuntu running.

The problem is WinXP won't boot now. It just hangs at the blinking cursor. Kubuntu sees the partition and reads from it just fine. Running sudo fdisk -l shows that the partition is there, it's the boot partition, and it's the correct filesystem. But the Windows setup CD says it can't find a hard drive.

I downloaded ms-sys but the make command gave me the following error lines:

make: cc: Command not found
make:*** [obj/br.o] Error 127

I'm assuming this means I'm missing a compiler but what one and where do I get it? (It's got to be in the repository but the Development section is chock full of goodies.) Edit: OK, I figured out to say "sudo apt-get install build-essential" but now it can't find msgfmt. Where would that be? Edit 2: Found it in gettext (sudo apt-get install gettext).

I've heard some bad things about ms-sys on these boards though. Will ms-sys help? Should I try Super Grub Disk instead? Or should I just bag it all and restore my WinXP image from the restore partition?

[The Liquidator]

Re: Can't boot WinXP but Kubuntu sees it

Hi and welcome

Try loading kubuntu and running in a terminal

sudo update-grub

Then reboot and try selecting XP again

Let us know please

[mgurak]

Re: Can't boot WinXP but Kubuntu sees it

Grub is still finding the WinXP install, but Windows still refuses to run.

I tried Super Grub Disk2 but it didn't find the Windows install.

[rfakhrai]

Re: Can't boot WinXP but Kubuntu sees it

possibly ntloader for winxp was messed up? in that case, there are fixes out there on the internet but I found the easiest way is to restore and/or reinstall.

[mgurak]

Re: Can't boot WinXP but Kubuntu sees it

Thanks rfakhrai. I did an image restore but now I'm getting an error saying "a disk read error occurred; press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart". Oh well, looks like this machine might be a Kubuntu-only box now. The funny thing is if I had bought it a year or two ago all I would have had is Linux on it. Maybe somehow it knew that?

[rfakhrai]

Re: Can't boot WinXP but Kubuntu sees it

the question is, are you able to see your windows harddrive from within linux? at least you won't loose data if that's the case.

[verndog]

Re: Can't boot WinXP but Kubuntu sees it

I'd be curious as to what boot_Info_script tells us. Its a simple script to download then run as root. It will give results in a file named RESULTS.txt. that would tell us a lot about your system booting. Click on my "blue" link below.

[mgurak]

Re: Can't boot WinXP but Kubuntu sees it

I was able to get my entire Windows installation copied to an external hard drive. So no data loss there, thank goodness.

Thanks for the link verndog. Unfortunately I already decided to do a fresh install of Kubuntu and forget about Windows on this machine. But I'll keep your script in mind if I have any problems in the future.