Help: Dual boot recovery from RHFC2 installation bug failure

[Mikael Konttinen]

Hello all, 

I'm quite new on Linux though I know my way around and very new on Red
Hat and Fedora. I've recently installed RHFC2 and Planet CCRMA and
discovered that my Windows XP doesn't boot any more. I've followed the
instructions on http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/ (sfdisk -d /dev/hda |
sfdisk --no-reread -H255 (alt. -H240) /dev/hda) but it didn't make any
difference. I've also tried to switch from AUTO to LBA and even LARGE,
without luck.  

This is my disk, after numerous attempts of recovery from booted RHFC1
Installation CD (linux rescue) and working RHFC2 installation.

# sfdisk -l /dev/hda
 
Disk /dev/hda: 19457 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from
0
 
   Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1          0+   1019    1020-   8193118+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2       1033   19456   18424  147990780    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda3   *   1020    1032      13     104422+  83  Linux
/dev/hda4          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
/dev/hda5       1033+   1096      64-    514048+  82  Linux swap
/dev/hda6       1097+   2039     943-   7574616   83  Linux
/dev/hda7       2040+  14787   12748- 102398278+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda8      14788+  19456    4669-  37503711    7  HPFS/NTFS

hda1 is my WinXP installation that doesn't boot. hda3 is my /boot with
GRUB on it, no GRUB on the MBR. GRUB and RHFC2 boots just fine. The
Windows NT bootloader pops up as supposed to and I'm even able to boot
back to GRUB (as configured in boot.ini during previous linux
installation). But, WinXP itself is not booting further than
Windows\System32\drivers\Mup.sys when in Safe Mode. 

If neccessary, I can sacrifice my current WinXP installation and
reinstall it, but I'd prefer to get it running. What I'm really worried
about is loosing any data on hda7/8 and I'd prefer not to be forced to
back up ~100GB of raw audio and video along with scans and documents on
DVD-R/W... and especially when not used to burning media on Linux. 

I'm not sure how disk geometry works so that is why I haven't dared to
reinstall WinXP in case the other partitions are blown to bits in case
the disk is repartitioned or otherwise disk geometry is again rewritten
during WinXP installation. 

Running a Samsung SP1614N 160GB on a Shuttle motherboard with nForce2
chipset. No third party software has been used. No other ways
attempted for recovery, apart from the sfdisk operations mentioned, so I
hope everything is still intact.

Very very thankful for help!


Yours

Mkn.


Ps. I'm not sure what the empty hda4 partition is doing there, but I
guess that's because only three primary partitions are used..?