Dual booting troubles - fixed!

Instinct · n00b Joined: 02 Aug 2002 Posts: 74

Ok, couldn't think of a good topic for this, bear with me.

I run a dual boot system, my other OS is XP. Before I migrated to gentoo I did an install on my laptop and had no problems getting back into XP from grub. So on to the main system. The ONLY thing I did different here is that I mounted the windows partition because that's where I backed up my previous home directory.

Now, when I try to go into XP it shows the slash screen, then the blue screen that would be scandisk, except it says 'autochk not found skipping AUTOCHECK' and then comes the BSOD, system terminated. I've looked and autochk.exe is right where it is supposed to be.

Before I get yelled at let me say that I'm not asking for help with a MS os here, I just want to know if it is in anyway possible that I could have screwed up the file system having it mounted in gentoo. Would not manualy unmounting it before reboot cause a problem? Is there an easy way to verify the fat32 partition is ok in linux? I always automounted the windows partition w/ freebsd and never had a problem, it has to be something I did in the last day or so.

This is so frustrating... I long for the day when windows is nowhere near my machine....

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Instinct · n00b Joined: 02 Aug 2002 Posts: 74

kanuslupus:
I always mount the partition as read/write. Gentoo works just wonderfully.

I seem to be able to read/write the windows partition without troubles while in gentoo.

I'm at a complete loss. It's as if XP just got pissed for no reason. Think I'm going dig up my old 98 boot disk and try a scandisk on the XP partition. If that doesn't do it I guess I'll try a reinstall. At least when linux breaks it gives you an idea of what's wrong. heh

The only thing that really made me ask about gentoo and mounting was that is does the 'remounting remaining file systems as readonly' before reboot, but I don't see how windows wouldn't just mount it up normaly on boot.

Me thinks my computer just gets lonely and creates random problems for me to work on.

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Is Windows on the first or second drive? Also, Windows prefers to be on the first partition.
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Quis separabit? Quo animo?

Instinct · n00b Joined: 02 Aug 2002 Posts: 74

sorry, meant to add this in the last reply.

Only one HD, windows is the first partition (/dev/hda1) Same exact config as on the laptop. I almost want to mount the windows partition on the laptop and try and recreate the problem, but that's probably not the smartest thing to do.

Going to go finish up some work outside, thanks for your help. The annoying part is just not knowing what went wrong.

Miles · Posted: Sun Aug 04, 2002 12:47 pm Post subject:

Is the XP partition NTFS or FAT32? If it's FAT32 then there shouldn't be a problem but I think NTFS writing support is still experiement and could be the source of your problem. But I don't have much experience in this area so I could be wrong.

Instinct · n00b Joined: 02 Aug 2002 Posts: 74

I found what happened. A little explanation just incase someone in the future has the problem.

After booting with a 98boot disk and having it tell me my C drive didn't exist(!) I looked in fdisk to verify it. It said it was hidden. I noticed this before but since I never took any action to hide it I figured that was just normal. Did a little searching on unhiding partitions and founds all sorts of interesting stuff. In the end, I had to change my menu.lst file from the example in the setup docs to this: