Need help on dual booting WinXP and Ubuntu
 

Hi everyone,

I would really appreciate any help on this one, it isn't easy to solve.

The situation : I have a single hard disk which I partitioned into 3 drives : 1 for Ubuntu, 1 for the swap, and 1 for WinXP. I have installed Ubuntu on te first one. I have WinXP mounted on the hda6 partition. Now, I'd like to choose the OS on boot. This is the tricky part : i have installed GAG, which detects the WinXP partition, but after choosing it, I have a black screen and nothing happens. Ubuntu works fine, even detects the Windows partition. I also trtied using grub, without success. I tried every single possible combination of :

root (hd0,5)
rootnoverify (hd0,5)
map
makeactive
chainloader +1

but when grub boots and I choose WinXP, it gives me error messages like : "srting cannot be read" or "invalid drive requested", or "error while parsing number", and does nothing. I have verified and reverified that the NTFS partition is mounted on hda6, in other words, (hd0,5). Where is the problem?

I have tried everything, been working on this for 2 days now and this is beginning to get frustrating.

So please, ANYONE who can help, please do so, I would REALLY appreciate it.

Thank you everyone very much,

Leslie

boot from XP cd and go into the repair mode. there are several boot programs you can run to set XP to be the only OS to boot. you can try to get grub working after that. it is best to install older to modern windows OSes before installing other OSes. Ubuntu will install grub for you and detect XP.

Why are you using GAG and Grub? I used GAG to dual-boot XP and OpenBSD and it worked fine.

The fact is that I forst used GAG, only to acknowledge that I get a black screen instead of Windows XP. Therefore I tried to boot with another program, and I found grub, which is incapable of loading WinXP.

However I have narrowed the problem down a bit : I get the error message "invalid device requested" after the line "makeactive" in the following code :

title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,5)
makeactive
chainloader +1

which is quite interesting because it gives no error when I give the root "device" hd0,5, whereas it does after "makeactive". Maybe this can help you...

Thank you

Grub can load WinXP, and offhand I'd say your config looks right, but I don't have mine in front of me to compare (this comp doesn't dual boot, or I'd just check it).