Scotty001100

Hi

I have installed on my computer Xandros 4.2 Home Premium, along with Windows XP Pro. I have an 80Gb drive with Windows on it and my 20Gb I gave installed Xandros. However the bootloader doesn't work for either Xandros or Windows.

I have previously installed Xandors without installing the boot loader on my main partition (Windows) but to boot i had to change settings to go thru the BIOS which is really annoying. I have instalkled both windows and xandros (with boot loader on windows partition) and now get a weird error messgae. the screen is black but the top left is green writing sayin "error while reading disk".

My only guess is theat the xandros boot loader stuffed up the MBR on windows and I have no idea how to fix it with both OS's being able to run smoothly and without having to go through the bios every time I want to load up an OS.


Any ideas would be great... also I'm new to Xandros and to linux and find alot of things abit hard to understand at the moment.

devils casper

First of all, remove Linux Boot Loader from MBR of Windows Hard Disk. Boot up from Windows Installation CD, select repair and execute fixmbr. This will remove
Linux Boot Loader and Windows XP will boot up on reboot.

Download SuperGRUB CD, boot up from it and select 'Fix GNU/Linux Boot Loader ( lilo )' option from list.

In case it doesn't work, you will have to swap Hard Disks. Easiest method is, Un-plug Windows Hard Disk, plug-in Linux Hard Disk as Primary and Install Linux. Plug-in Windows Hard Disk as Secondary/Slave and add its entry in Linux Boot Loader. That way, Both Hard Disks will be bootable separately and you wont have to change anything in BIOS.

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Scotty001100

I have tried using the SuperGRUB disk as to your instructions but that failed. So I swapped my hard drives around so that Xandros (20Gb) is Primary Master and Windows Xp (80Gb) is Primary Slave.

Lilo recognises Windows XP but when I press enter, it reloads Lilo but this time without the Winodws XP option and then loads into Xandros.

Here is my lilo.conf file to see if anything is wrong with it:

boot=/dev/hda
install=/boot/cboot.b
message=/boot/splash.lilo
timeout=150
map=/boot/map
prompt
lba32
read-only
compact
fix-table
other=/dev/mapper/pdc_fdbfbfcj1
label=Windows®_XP
image=/vmlinuz
label=Xandros_4_Professional
vga=791
root=/dev/hda1
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.6.18-dcc-smp.gz
append="quiet rw acpi=on resume2=swap:/dev/hda5 "
image=/vmlinuz
label=Safe_Video_Mode
vga=791
root=/dev/hda1
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.6.18-dcc-smp.gz
append="3 quiet rw acpi=on resume2=swap:/dev/hda5 "
image=/vmlinuz
label=Configure_(Expert)
vga=normal
root=/dev/hda1
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.6.18-dcc-smp.gz
append="single quiet rw acpi=on resume2=swap:/dev/hda5 noresume noresume2 nosplash=y "


I also changed my boot.ini file on C:\

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

rdisk(0) was the orgiginal but changed to rdisk(1) as its now slave. I'm pretty sure its right but then again I could be wrong.

Also I noticed a file, /etc/lilop.conf it is much the same as lilo.conf but without
other=/dev/mapper/pdc_fdbfbfcj1
label=Windows®_XP

Hope some of this inof might help you to figure out whats going on with the LILO Boot Loader

Scotty001100

Finally, both Windows XP and Xandros dual boot wonderfully. For other people who share this difficulty here is a how to with using the Windows Bootloader.

Booting Linux from Windows NT/2000's Boot Manager

Its about 4 years old but did wonders for me and can be used for other distros as well. (The example used Red Hat 8.0)

Check it out!



And thanks for your help devils_casper!

devils casper

'dd' command doesn't work in most of machines. If you want to use Windows Boot Loader only, follow instructions from here.

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