-------- Forwarded Message -------- From: Varadarajan V nirvanar@gmail.com Reply-To: GNU/Linux Users Group, Mumbai, India linuxers@mm.glug-bom.org To: GNU/Linux Users Group, Mumbai, India linuxers@mm.glug-bom.org Subject: Re: [ILUG-BOM] changing boot.ini Date: Thu, 7 Dec 2006 11:56:00 +0100
On 12/6/06, BombayNews bombaynews@hotmail.com wrote:
Now after some boot files in XP got corrupted, the computer refused to boot.
Why would Ubuntu not boot if XP got corrupted? Are you sure Grub was the boot menu or was it the other way that XP loads grub to boot Ubuntu?
According to the engineer this is a usual problem with XP. He has advised editing boot.ini to make Linux the default OS but he warned that it can be done only once. Also that if Linux is made default Windows XP cannot be opened, etc.
I had a coulple of experiences in the past that for some reasons when I did a "grub-install" on my dual-boot machine with FC and XP, FC boot up but XP didnt. This was a problem with boot.ini file. I had to change the harddisk number in the boot.ini file and it worked. I am not that experienced with grub so I do not know what changes happened after I installed grub for the second time. May be someone on the list can explain that :-)
But what do u mean by XP files corrupted? Did you see any errors after you selected XP in grub menu? If there were errors from XP then Grub works fine and Ubuntu should boot.
what actually happened was when the computer was switched on, I got the message :
Boot from CD: Disk Boot Failure. Insert System Disk and Press Enter
The system was back to normal after the engineer restored some corrupted XP files with a backup CD. Why should this be so? I thought GRUB was independent of XP and corruption in XP files would not matter. But the engineer says XP is the primary system installed on the machine with Linux running on other partitions so corrupted XP would mean that the machine would not start at all.
This is how the boot.ini file reads. It is installed in the main partition as XP.
[boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /noexecute=optin