HELP! Urgent! XP's gone!!

[sluthy]

Okay, I've installed Fedora 4, looks good, but one problem...

XP does not come up in my GRUB menu, and the Other... menu comes up with nothing but an error. And when I do select Fedora, it comes up with a heap of errors such as "I/O error with hda1, logical sector 1,2,3,4........". Gulp.

I'm certain I told the installer to touch nothing but the MBR to change the Xandros LILO to the Fedora GRUB. How do i fix this? hda1 is my 20GB Windows XP disc, hdb1/2/3 is my Linux disk.

[sluthy]

Just in case you ask, this is my current grub.conf file:

The installer referred to my XP drive as hda1, and the linux partitions to hdb1, b2, b3...

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
# root (hd1,0)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hdb3
# initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd1,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core (2.6.11-1.1369_FC4)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.img
title Other
rootnoverify (hd1,3)
chainloader +1

[budman7]

That grub.conf seems to be a little messed up.

hda1 = hd0,0 = first partition of primary master
hdb1 = hd1,0 = first partition on primary slave
hdb4 = hd1,3 = fourth partition on primary slave

You said Windows is on hda, but your grub.conf says it is on hdb4.

[sluthy]

So, I should edit this to read:

#boot=/dev/hda
default=1
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd1,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core (2.6.11-1.1369_FC4)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.img
title Windows
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1?

Or do I have to specify the kernel and initrd locations for XP too? How do I find these?

[sluthy]

Okay, it's working now, sort of. I changed the code to this:
# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
# root (hd1,0)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hdb3
# initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=1
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd1,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core (2.6.11-1.1369_FC4)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.img
title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
makeactive
boot

This works, but when I select Windows, GRUB takes a while (30 sec maybe), where it just says:

Boting "Windows"
rootnoverify(hd0,0)
chainloader +1

It hangs there for a while before going into Windows. Also, when I boot Linux, I get there errors:

Red Hat nash version 4.215 starting
Buffer I/O error on device hda1, logical block 0
Buffer I/O error on device hda1, logical block 1
Buffer I/O error on device hda1, logical block 2
Buffer I/O error on device hda1, logical block 3
Buffer I/O error on device hda1, logical block 4
Buffer I/O error on device hda1, logical block 5
Buffer I/O error on device hda1, logical block 6
Buffer I/O error on device hda1, logical block 7
Buffer I/O error on device hda1, logical block 8
Buffer I/O error on device hda1, logical block 9
Buffer I/O error on device hda1, logical block 10
Buffer I/O error on device hda1, logical block 11
Buffer I/O error on device hda1, logical block 12
Buffer I/O error on device hda1, logical block 13
INIT: version 2.85
...etc.

It works, but that doesn't exactly sound good to me.Is this bad? Is there any way I can browse the NTFS partition on that drive?

[budman7]

See this page for Ntfs read support.
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/instructions.html