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FrozenGate by Avery

stupid stupid dual booting w/ linux

C

climbak

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Joined
Apr 14, 2008
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Sometimes I really can't stand linux at all. This is one of those times. I just updated to Fedora 9 and now my Windows XP install won't boot. It worked fine with Fedora 8. Such a pain in the ass. And to make things more frustrating, it's teasing me. Windows gets about half way through the boot process then the computer just shuts off and restarts. I hate computers.
 





You have boot selection running under Linux I assume? That is indeed the nature of Linux. So many hands in the pie improving it, little changes while improving the OS can mess up the booting of a second OS. Somebody must have made some subtle changes to GRUB or another bootloader. I've long since separated the two. XP runs on one system and Linux on all the other systems.
 
If you weren't able to boot XP as a whole any more I'd say you got a corrupt MBR. But since you apparently can select XP in GRUB and partially boot it, I'm not sure what's going on here. Can you boot XP into safe mode?
 
I find it a lot safer to to use the windows boot manager. You can set it up to default to whichever os you want even with the windows boot manager. I run a triple boot xp sp3, vista sp1, and kubuntu 8.04 all from the vista boot manager. It has no problem booting to xp by default and since it is at a single boot screen its pretty fast.
 
Hmm... that's odd...

So, before it reboots, you see the windows logo starting up?

Does it flash to a blue screen for half a second before it reboots?

How do you have your partitions set up? or is it a separate drive?

it sounds like it's *not* the MBR or boot sector, which are the two most common causes of this, since if you see that windows logo it's gotten past that point.
 
I've tried safe mode and it does not work. I have had boot loader issues in the past, but this time that part seems to be fine. I dont get the blue screen of death at all. It just shuts off abruptly in the middle of the windows loading logo thing. Everything was working fine with fedora 8, but I updated to FC9 and now windows won't load. They are on separate hard drives so I'm not sure why its not working. If worst comes to worst, I have full access to the data on the drive, unlike last year when I lost everything, so I could copy it all to my linux drive and do a fresh install of windows, but I really don't want to deal with that again.
 
if you installed/upgraded linux and you had windows on dual boot then you may have a corrupted kernel or some other files.

this happens a lot with dual boots, try to google something about the Ubuntu windows installer (which installs Ubuntu 8.04 INSIDE windows). it has caused problems like this and people are always trying to help eachother on those linux forums ;)
 
yeah, I posted on the fedora forum, but haven't gotten anything that will help me yet. I need to dig out my XP disc and run chkdisk
 
if it's on a separate drive that you just recently added, you may have added it to a lower-numbered connector, which could confuse windows which expects to be the first drive.

try switching the connectors around, though you may end up having to boot off a linux cd to reconfigure grub once you rearrange it to a way windows likes.
 
I installed the drive about a year ago and it has worked fine up until I installed fedora 9. I'm guessing the install procedure messed up some random file with windows. From what I've been able to piece together from the fedora forum, windows is crashing out as it tries to start the GUI.
 
Do you have important info on both boots? If not just format it and ghost the disk when you get the OSes to be like you want, so you'll never have a problem again.
 
nikokapo said:
Do you have important info on both boots? If not just format it and ghost the disk when you get the OSes to be like you want, so you'll never have a problem again.
Click to expand...

you can probably back up important files by mounting the drive on another computer, after that I would fdisk the drive and then reinstall, hdds are so cheap these days its always safer to give each os its own hard drive.
 
like I mentioned before, windows may not like the order that the drives are installed. if it expects to be booting off the first drive on the system, and you've gone and added the linux drive into the "first drive" position, windows may be crapping out not knowing where its files are.

have you tried physically removing the linux drive and trying to boot windows?

if that works, plug the linux drive into a higher-numbered port than the windows drive.. you may then have to reinstall grub to get linux to boot.
 
Yeah, I may try unplugging the linux drive. It's on a secondary plug though. I still need to try to find my recovery disc so I can run chckdisk.
 
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