Dual Boot XP and Ubuntu HELP Please!

[LIGC]

I have Windows XP Professsional on the first partition of my hard drive, and Ubuntu 6.06 on the second. Ubuntu boots fine, but when I try to boot XP I get this:

Booting 'Microsoft Windows XP Professional
root (hd0,0)
Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1
A disk read error occurred
Press ctrl+alt+delete to Restart

Here is my menu.lst file:

title		Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.15-23-386

root		(hd0,1)
kernel		/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-23-386 root=/dev/hda2 ro quiet splash
initrd		/boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-23-386
savedefault
boot

title		Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.15-23-386 (recovery mode)
root		(hd0,1)
kernel		/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-23-386 root=/dev/hda2 ro single
initrd		/boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-23-386
boot

title		Ubuntu, memtest86+
root		(hd0,1)
kernel		/boot/memtest86+.bin 
boot

### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST

# This is a divider, added to separate the menu items below from the Debian
# ones.

title		Other operating systems:
root
# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/hda1

title		Microsoft Windows XP Professional
root	(hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader	+1

please help!

[rcgreen]

Did the problem start out of the blue, or did it start right
after installing linux?. You might be able to repair windows
by booting the microsoft cd, but will have to have a way
to reinstall the GRUB bootloader afterward.

[LIGC]

The problem started when I installed Ubuntu. I'll restore the MBR using windows cd, and i'll try to get grub back using the ubuntu cd.

[mariana.malta]

I have the same problem.

I wanted to installed windows XP and Edubuntu 6.06 on a brand new PC, same drive 2 partitions, dual boot.

I had some problems with Edubuntu because of the Intel Graphics card inboard. But after a few attemps with different parameters It worked. Grub installed in MBR perfectly. I was happy. Until....

when I booted again the pc in Windows it gave me a fatal error. I can boot to Edubuntu but not to Windows. The MBR is ok, but something went wrong with the boot of windows. As I do not uderstand a thing of windows I thought in:
1. Install windows again in the first partition
2. Boot with a LInux floppy and then update and install grub on the MBR

But not possible. This PC doesn't allow me to boot from floppies!

Then I thought:
1. Install windows again in the first partition
2. Boot from LIve Edubuntu
3. Update and install grub on the MBR

BEfore installing windows I tried this procedure but:
In Edubuntu I can mount the windows partition and see all the files that are there, but I am not able to do the chroot to the drive (only one /dev/sda)

then I thought:
I boot with Knoppix 4 instead of Live Edubuntu.

I did it, could see the disk /dev/sda (it mounts it automaticlly) I could chroot to this disk. I could do update-grub but can't actually do what I want: grub-install /dev/sda! it gives me several errors saying that /dev/null is not accessible!

I am hopeless here...

The harddrive is new, so I can start all over again because I do not have anything on it as data. But why do I have to install EVERYTHING again if it should be possible to re-do the MBR after a windows installation?

If I boot with a Windows XP CD and go to the recover mode, what actually should I do? simply "fixmbr"?

And what happens?

Can you give me a help?

Thank you,
Mariana

[LIGC]

What I ended up doing was booting up the live cd and deleting all of my ubuntu partitions, so only the windows xp partition remained. I figured the problem went in the installation of xp, so i reinstalled it in the same partition. Then for partitioning ubuntu i put it in hda2, and made an extended partition, making swap hda5 and a fat32 partition hda6. Somehow, all of that worked and I had a perfect dual boot! Hopefully this helps.

[jenuths]

I ran into this problem when resigning a ntfs partition using ntfsresize from kubuntu 7.04.

Of course, after installing kubuntu, windows xp would not boot and gave the infamous

A Disk Read Error Occurred.
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del

As an interim solution, and found a cdrom which would boot windows: fixntldr.iso.zip seemed to do the trick.

It seems that it is a problem with the geometry combined with the hard coding of the geometry into the partition by windows xp.

The solution I used was this:

sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --force -no-reread -H255 /dev/hda
hexedit /dev/hda1 (/dev/hda1 was my windows partition)
[press enter]
7e1a
FF
ctrl-x, "y"
and that's it.

The first thing changes the geometry of the partition table to have 255 heads as is expected by windows. The second changes the hard coded byte in the windows partition table to 255 (FF in hex), which is the number of heads in the new partition table.

And that's it.