Debian and XP Dual boot: XP never gets past pre-logon splash screen

[aka1nas]

Hi all,
I just set up debian on a seperate 40GB hard drive and got dual boot working. Problem is, XP is fubar now and never gets past the splash screen before the logon(the blue one with the Windows XP logo). I tried everything I could think of including re-installing debian and using lilo instead of grub and even editing the lilo config. I followed some steps on the debian.org site to undo dual-booting and tried to get into the recovery console from my original XP cd which I dug out. The XP install disk got to the portion after it loads drivers and says " starting windows setup" in the status bar and then hangs. I luckily had an old win2k disc that I booted off of, got into the recovery console and did fixmbr. This got rid of lilo, and I temporarily disabled the 40GB linux drive in the BIOS. However, I still have the same problem with XP not getting to the logon screen. Do you guys have any ideas for either fixing the dual boot issue or at least fixing my windows install so I am back to square one?

More detailed hardware info:

Dual Athlon 2100+
MSI K7d -l
1GB RAM
1x 80GB drive (windows)
1x 40GB drive (linux)
2x160GB drives (Windows software RAID 0 array on seperate PCI ATA controller)
Geforce FX 5900


I was running XP SP2 and the current weekly version of debian

 

[drag]

I think that there is something else that is going wrong. Unless you made a mistake and accidently formatted the windows partition or something like that the Debian installer would never touch WinXP in any way.

The only thing that it does is mess around with the master boot record.


Did you add the second harddrive to the machine in order to get Debian going, or did Windows have it as one of it's drives? Did you move anything around as far as the cabling on your disks goes? If you did, try undoing the changes and see if that fixes it.

Maybe there is something physically wrong with the partition... try mounting it inside linux and see if you can navigate around in it and copy files from it (wouldn't move anything around or add files though). Also sometimes Windows XP sometimes has issues with drives that it thinks that are it's own, but get formatted into a different filing system... Like if it was drive D:, but now it's there, but WinXP can't access it anymore and it throws a hissy fit.

Have you tried getting into safe mode? If your overclocking anything, turn all that off till you get it working again.

 

[aka1nas]

Hi drag,
yeah this drive was an ntfs drive before I reformatted it and put debian on it. I tried booting into safe mode but it has the same issue (to clarify the splash screen I am talking about is after the boot options, right before the logon screen). I of course already de-overclocked all my settings once I ran into a problem.

Now what did happen is this;

I had XP originally on the 40GB drive, I then used Ghost 9.0 to copy the 40GB over to the 80GB drive. This worked fine except for the creative audigy drivers, which I did have to reinstall. So the 40Gb drive is C and the 80Gb drive is E. I then booted off the 80 and it's been working ever since. However, it was not allowing me to change C to another drive letter. but, if I disabled the old 40GB drive in the BIOS, it booted into the new drive fine and didn't complain(it was still drive E). I did copy the MBR from drive to drive when I did the ghosting.

 

[drag]

Jeez.

I think you have a bit of a mess. It may be quicker to simply start from scratch, put the 80gig as the primary master install WinXP on it, then install Debian on the second harddrive. Then leave the master boot record alone on the windows drive and setup the bios to boot from the debian drive and use grub or lilo to dual boot.

Sorry, otherwise all I can think of is using grub and play around with remapping drives around. Grub can tell the OSes the drive arrangements are different then what they realy are. By addind this line, for instance, to a menu entry in the grub config:
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd0) (hd1)

will tell the booting os that the harddrives have been switched around...

Otherwise I can't think of anything to concrete....

Since you said that you can disable the 40gig and then Windows will work, then maybe...

In the MBR their is a hex number that is suppose to corrispond to the partition type being used for each particular partition. Now if you take a fat32 partition and just format it to ext3 without messing around with the partition types it may cause problems. This sort of thing is ignored by Linux, but it could be that Windows is looking at that partition type and thinks that it is realy fat32 when it's realy been formatted ext2.

Now in those partition types there are a few variations of "FAT", Fat16, Fat32, etc etc.

One variation is "hidden" Fat partition. If you set it to hidden then Windows will ignore that partition like it didn't exist. Grub can play around with this fact....

Linux has it's own fdisk utilities, one is fdisk and the other is cfdisk, among others. So one thing you can try is to boot up with Debian, run cfdisk or fdisk and manipulate the partition types, and change them to ext2(linux) then save the change and reboot. You don't need to reformat or anything, this only affects settings in the MBR...

Then maybe Windows will work.


Otherwise another trick you can try is to set the partition type to fat and use grub to try to hide it's existance from Windows.

In the menu entry for your Windows boot in grub you can add the line:
hide (hd0,0)

hd0 referse to the drive, grub (like computers in general) start counting from zero. So 0 is the first harddrive, 1 is the second, 2 is the third so on and so forth.

The second number is the partition number that refers to a partition on that harddrive.

So for example:
(hd1,3)

Will refer to the fourth partition on the second harddrive. (more then slightly confusing I know.)


But all that is just guess work. I know that in Linux you just have to edit the /etc/fstab file to fix any issues with mounting what partition to what, but in windows I don't know how to fix something like that.

 

[aka1nas]

Thanks for the info drag. I will try all that out when I get home today. Another weird thing is that I got another XP install CD to try and it also hangs on the setup! I tried even disabling both hard drives in the BIOS, unplugged all my extra USB devices and it still does it. Win2k's setup seems to be ok though.