[fzubair]

1. My computer was running Windows XP with SP1 perfectly. Every thing was rosy (windowy). At that point, my primary windows partition sat between cylinder 14-3903.
2. I installed linux with grub. I put the grub in MBR, and I put create a 100 MB partition from cylinder 1-13 to hold /boot.
3. Now when I turn on my computer, grub gives me an options to run linux or windows. Linux runs fine, but windows can not boot up. I played around with grub.conf file, tried different setting, but to no avail.
4. On a website I found a suggestion that fdisk /MBR will make windows boot. I tried that and now grub does not come up (as probably I have overwritten it). So, I can neither boot in linux nor in windows.


How do I fix it?
- One solution is to reinstall linux from scratch, which is not a problem since I am used to reinstalling operating systems (courtesy of windows).
- Another solution is I reinstall grub in MBR, and how can I do it. (??)
- Also once grub is working and showing me linux and windows etc., how should i configure it so that it boots both windows and linux.

I am including outputs of fdisk /dev/hdb and fdisk /dev/hdc.

/dev/hdb1 14-3093 NTFS (winxp partition)
/dev/hdb2 LBA
/dev/hdb3 1-13 ext3 (/boot)
/dev/hdb5 NTFS
/dev/hdb6 ext3 (/)
/dev/hdb7 vfat

/dev/hdc1 LBA
/dev/hdc2 ext3 (/home) /dev/hdc3 swap
/dev/hdc5 vfat
/dev/hdc6 vfat (/software)

[lynch]

Try this:

• Move the hard drive for XP to the Primary Master(making it hda)
• The drive for Linux can be anywhere.Depending on what other drives you have(cdrom,zip,etc)you may want it on the Secondary Master(hdc)
• Install XP first to hda
• Install Linux to the other drive
• Install bootloader to MBR
• Do NOT create another small partition at the front of the drive

You have the XP and Linux(what distro of Linux? )
partitions scrambled across 2 drives which is unescessary.Keep them seperated.If you want to access files from XP and Linux create a fat32 partition to store data you can see from either OS.
HTH
lynch