Dual boot FC2T2 and WinXP?

[Brian Bober]

On Sat, 03 Apr 2004 16:21:39 -0800 Vincent <pros-n-cons at bak.rr.com>
> 
> My setup came across the same problem as most here noted. FC2-t2
> chewed up my win XP. First I tried fooling around with grub's parameters
> snip
>    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/hda1   *           1       40641    20482843+   7  HPFS/NTFS

I might be able to help you...

Although I never think dual-booting is a good idea, at least it looks like you
were smart enough to do one OS per disk. Next time you might wanna use VMWare
instead of dual-booting like that. You can use VMWare on the second disk from
within Windows, and it'll stop Linux from messing with the first one. You are
probably best off, though, buying an old used system off Ebay to install Fedora
on (and it'll probably cost about the same as VMWare). Dual booting is just a
bad idea. I used to dual boot Win95 and Slackware when I was a teenager. Two
systems is just so much better. It also means you can never really run a
web-server if you dual boot. You might wanna check out VMWare if you want only
one system. Its very nice.

Three options:

1) I have a tool I wrote that might be of assistance to you that allows you to
fix your MBR so its the Windows XP MBR again, but since I installed Fedora on a
new 250GB hard disk, I'll have to go fetch them off the old disk. If you want
it, I can grab it for you off the old disk. If you don't have a windows system
handy, hopefully it works in Wine or I could try porting it to Linux for you.
That might take some time and a reinstallation of VMWare. Use my tools at your
own risk. If you want them, then email me.

2) You can use wine possibly to run the .exe files for the boot disks, and
hopefully it'll work as long as its only to extract data and not write the
disk.

3) Your other option is to buy a cheapo used 10GB disk or something, install
Windows XP on it, and then snatch the stuff from the partition on the other
disk (hopefully), then reinstall the OS on the original disk.

Here's the rub, though... Only method 1, you will be able to boot back into
Windows as if nothing ever happened, and that's ONLY if only the XP MBR has
been replaced by Linux's, but everything else is OK. Hopefully your partition
table is intact, or you'll have to know where the NTFS partition is. I will
eventually possibly add the ability to search for the NTFS partition on the
disk, but I haven't yet. It looks like your partition table is still intact.
The other two methods will mean you'll have to install Windows over its current
installation, get your data backed up, then reinstall it with a fresh reformat.

> I tried booting from windows CD and it just hangs after "detecting hardware"

Are you sure that you don't have some hardware issue that'd affect any OS on
the system?


> 
> I'm new to the list and can't reply to the thread, sorry if this
> top-posts.

I don't think I can help top-posting either since I subscribe to digest mode
and I don't know if thread information is retained.