Dual Boot, Grub, FC3-WinXpSP2, 2 drives. No go.

[Nigel Wade]

Nat Gross wrote:

>>
> The reason for this is that once upon a time, Win did in fact use drive 
> C: as its home drive, and the second drive was 'extra'. Then one day, 
> that install of win crashed and burned and cost me two weeks, (and I 
> switched to Linux on my other machine), so when I re-installed Win, I 
> used my second drive as the main guy, and just left drive C:, waiting 
> for Linux.... And here I am.

This may be the root of the problem.

I think this is what Windows XP does at installation. It scans for active 
partitions to see if there is another Windows installation. If it thinks 
it's found one it leaves it active as the default boot partition. Rather 
than install the bootloader info on the new partition it installs it on the 
existing, active, partition and configures it to include the newly installed 
Windows XP.

If you subsequently move the boot disk or overwrite that partition you lose 
your ability to boot Windows.

Is there a way to fix this? Not sure. Someone else suggested fixboot from 
rescue mode on the Windows XP CD. It's worth a try.

-- 
Nigel Wade, System Administrator, Space Plasma Physics Group,
             University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK
E-mail :    nmw at ion.le.ac.uk
Phone :     +44 (0)116 2523548, Fax : +44 (0)116 2523555