Problem running XP after installing Ubuntu

[sauronnikko]

Hi. I installed Ubuntu 9.04 with the intention of dual-booting with Windows XP (SP3). I have a 500GB Hard Drive and chose to install Ubuntu "side by side" with XP, giving Ubuntu a little less than 50GB. Ubuntu works fine, but when I tried starting XP in the GRUB booting screen, the XP logo would appear for like 2 seconds, followed by a blue screen with white character which appeared and vanished so quickly that it was and is impossible to read and then the system reboots.

I don't understand what the problem is. In Ubuntu I can mount my Windows partition (which is NTFS btw) and can see and use any file that it's present, so the files are not lost. What is troubling is the fact that when I tried to reinstall XP, and was shown the list of available partitions, it said that ALL the partitions, including the XP one, were Unknown.

I appreciate any help. I really don't want to have to format XP partition and start all over again. Thanks in advance

[yancek]

"side by side" with XP

I'm not sure what side by side means? Did you create a separate partition for Ubuntu? If so, how? Use windows partitioner or Ubuntus? If you're getting an xp logo, something is probably amiss in your xp bootloader files. Best thing to do to get help here is to boot Ubuntu, log in to a terminal/konsole and run the command: sudo fdisk -l, this will give partition information. Post it here. Also post the contents of the /boot/grub/menu.lst file. Leave out the top part that has lines beginning with hash mark (#).

[D-cat]

sudo fdisk -l
(that's FDISK -L in lower case)

cat /boot/grub/menu.lst | grep -v \#

[sauronnikko]

Thank you. Fortunately, a simple CHKDSK from Windows XP recovery console (using XP CD) solved my problem. When I said "side by side" I did it because the Ubuntu installer said the same thing. I think that it just takes some free space (in my case I ordered that it were 50GB) from XP whole NTFS partition, resizes this partition, and what's left it's used by ext3 and swap. Thanks again for your replies!

[D-cat]

when I tried to reinstall XP, and was shown the list of available partitions, it said that ALL the partitions, including the XP one, were Unknown.

That's the line that got us. Sorry. Without that bit of information, we would have suggested the chkdsk first, but that implied that you couldn't even access the disk from a windows based OS to run chkdsk in the first place. Apparently we were wrong.

Thank you for telling us your solution. I'm glad you are back up and running. Enjoy!