installing and booting windows xp after linux

[michaellouis]

i kind of messed things up.


I wanted to reinstall windows because it has progressively been not working as well. (suprise, suprise).

Originally I had windows xp and linux on two ide hardrives windows xp was on hdd0 and linux on hdd1. I got dual booting (without going through the bios and selecting the drive) through grub with help i got here.

To try to not mess up linux I bought a new hard dive, I'm at my limit with ATA hard drives so I got a new SATA one because it was cheap. disconnected all the old hard dives and installed the SATA one and loaded windows xp fine on that.

I can go into bios, choose either hdd0 or the sata drive and boot both the new and old copy of windows fine (i'm using the old copy of windows now because not everything is on the new one). However, if I try to go to hdd1 with linux and boot linux. I get to the grub screen and choose suse.

after it loads a lot a bunch of things in the boot up, it says it can't find hda6 and sends me to what it says \bin\sh with a dollar sign and i can type things but i really don't know what to do at this point.

If I choose windows xp in grub (hoping it would go to the old windows) I just get a black screen and the computer locks up.

I imagine linux and grub are can't map the hard drives correctly but is there a way to correct this?

[michaellouis]

this is what i actually get when linux boots


Loading ext3
resume device /dev/hda5 not found (ignore)
waiting for device /dev/hda6 to appear: ............. not found -- exiting to /bin/sh
sh: no job control in this shell
$

[devils casper]

hi michaellouis !


you are right, GRUB is not mapping drives correctly. your SATA disk is Primary Master now and Linux is Secondry/slave.
execute 'fdisk -l' in /bin/sh shell and post output here.






Casper

[michaellouis]

okay so,

number 1, i'm a moron
number 2, i didn't i reconnect the original hard drives in the right order but at least i figured out my own mistake. i guess grub wasn't mapping the drives correctly because they weren't put back in the right order.

however, i have a new question. how do i mount the new hard drive sata drive in linux? yast can see the harddrive but i can't access it. i'll try to figure it out myself, but any suggestion of where to get an explination on how to do this or directions here would be greatly appreciated.

also, for future reference. like i said before i'm a newbie to this, but i didn't realize earlier that there is a specific newbie forum. i'm using suse, so i just assumed this is the place for questions but should i be posting the questions there instead?

[devils casper]

however, i have a new question. how do i mount the new hard drive sata drive in linux? yast can see the harddrive but i can't access it. i'll try to figure it out myself, but any suggestion of where to get an explination on how to do this or directions here would be greatly appreciated

mount disk using 'mount' commadn. you must be root to do that. execute su - to gain root privileges.

su -
fdisk -l

note down SATA partitions number ( /dev/sda1, 2 etc. )
create mount point for each partition.

mkdir /media/sata1
mount -t <file_system>  /dev/sdxx  /media/sata1

for FAT32 <file_system> is vfat, for NTFS its ntfs. replace xx with partition number.
check /media/sata1 folder.

also, for future reference. like i said before i'm a newbie to this, but i didn't realize earlier that there is a specific newbie forum. i'm using suse, so i just assumed this is the place for questions but should i be posting the questions there instead?

if problem is SuSe specific, post in SuSe forum.






Casper

[michaellouis]

thanks for all the help. before I saw your response I found a thread, i tried to find it so i could put it here that worked.

because i'm curious, what you told me would just mount the hard drive for the specific session? or every time i boot up.

the method i used was create a folder called windows/F (where suse put all my windows hard drives) then edit the /etc/fstab file by putting in the line
/dev/sda1 /windows/F ntfs "then the same code that was used for all my other hard drives.

it worked.

Now I want to be able to boot with this drive using my grub. But I'm having problems. I tried using your directions from before:

add
(sd0) /dev/sda
to the /boot/grub/device.map

then add the entry to /boot/grub/menu.lst
title Windows XP NEW
rootnoverify (sd0,0)
chainloader +1

I left out,

map (hd0)(hd1)
map (hd1)(hd0)

because i thought since windows is the first sata drive it wouldn't need me to arrange hard drive order, but could that be the problem?

[devils casper]

you are a fast learner ! Well Done !!

(sd0) /dev/sda
to the /boot/grub/device.map
then add the entry to /boot/grub/menu.lst
title Windows XP NEW
rootnoverify (sd0,0)
chainloader +1

mounting or other disk related tasks differentiate between SATA (sdxx) and PATA (hdxx) harddisks but grub 'device mapping' uses common naming conventions for all types of Harddisks. its should be (hdx) instead of (sdx).

edit device.map file and assign name 'hd2' to SATA harddisk. ( i assume you have two PATA harddisks attached ). add mapping code in menu.lst file.





Casper

[michaellouis]

Thanks!

That's another good thing to know.

I haven't been able to fix the problem yet. But I will when I get home.

[michaellouis]

it ended up not working

I set it up by adding

(hd3) /dev/sda

to the /boot/grub/device.map, because I have three PATA hard drives and this would be the fourth hard drive.


then add the entry to /boot/grub/menu.lst

title Windows XP NEW
rootnoverify (hd3,0)
map (hd0) (hd3)
map (hd3) (hd0)
chainloader +1

After that, the system just freezes and I have to Alt+Ctrl+Del.

So I tried without mapping the drives

changing it to

title Windows XP NEW
rootnoverify (hd3,0)
chainloader +1

and I get the old "NTLDR is missing" error.

[devils casper]

post the output of fdisk -l and contents of menu.lst file.






Casper