Trying to boot of XP disc to have a dual booting system

Message

donkey1984 · Post by **donkey1984** » Fri Apr 02, 2004 12:04 am

Does anyone know why i wouldnt be able to boot off the windows disc... I am trying to put xp on the same hd and I already have the partition ready... And I can boot off the gentoo boot disc.... But when I try to boot off the windows boot disk it says... "finding your systems hardware" or whatever ... for a few seconds and then the screen goes blank and it doesnt go any further... Can someone help me... thanks... you guys are great... I would greatly appreaciate it...

jmusits · Post by **jmusits** » Fri Apr 02, 2004 4:50 am

Can you be more specific about the problem, its a little fuzzy.

Jason

Convex · Post by **Convex** » Fri Apr 02, 2004 5:06 am

probably doesnt like something about the parititions you made. just a guess...

jmusits · Post by **jmusits** » Fri Apr 02, 2004 5:22 am

Did you create the windows boot disk before or after making the partition for gentoo. If you made it before you created the gentoo partition I don't think windows will boot. Is there a reason you are not using grub or lilo?

Jason

donkey1984 · Post by **donkey1984** » Fri Apr 02, 2004 7:19 pm

I have a working gentoo system... and I read on this forum how to install xp on the same hd... because alot of people do it on a seperate hard drive... my partition table looks like this...

/dev/hde1 /boot
/dev/hde2 / (FAT32)
/dev/hde3 /
/dev/hde5 /swap
/dev/hde6 /home

I didnt know if you needed to know that or not... My windows boot cd was made before i installed gentoo along time ago... and has worked .. do you think it could be in the fstab?? I dont have the windows partition mounted because I asked someone before if i should mount it and they said no... I am not using grub on my gentoo system... I just dont know how i would install xp through grub... As you can see I am a noob...

jmusits · Post by **jmusits** » Fri Apr 02, 2004 10:56 pm

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/h ... hap=9#grub
Has information about about setting up grub for dual boot systems. You will be particularly interested in the following line:

Code: Select all

# The next three lines are only if you dualboot with a Windows system.
# In this case, Windows is hosted on /dev/hda6.
title=Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,5)
chainloader +1

Just change the line

Code: Select all

rootnoverify (hd0,5)

to

Code: Select all

rootnoverify (hd0,1)

Hope this helps

Jason

jmusits · Post by **jmusits** » Fri Apr 02, 2004 10:59 pm

After you get booted into Windows you will probably want to make a new boot disk. Your other obviously doesn't work since you changed the partition table after making it.

Jason

donkey1984 · Post by **donkey1984** » Mon Apr 05, 2004 5:36 am

Yeah I have that already created the dual boot up... should i go into that and put the bootable xp cd in??

jmusits · Post by **jmusits** » Tue Apr 06, 2004 9:13 pm

I'm not quite sure I understand what you are trying to do. Why are you needing to boot off the WinXP boot cd?

Jason

slycordinator · Post by **slycordinator** » Tue Apr 06, 2004 9:29 pm

What are you talking about? Installing XP through grub?!

If you've got your bios set up such that it can boot from CD (you'll probably have to change bios settings for this) all you gotta do is put the CD in the drive, reboot the computer, then it will boot off the CD and let you do the whole install process for XP.

But since grub is installed on the mbr, installing XP will remove grub. You'll have to install XP then boot off the reboot off the gentoo CD and install grub again to the mbr.

Though you could make it so you can boot gentoo using the NTLDR. Assuming you've got grub on the mbr all you'd do is enter the following:
dd if=/dev/hde of=linux.bin bs=512 count=1

Then copy linux.bin to a floppy and after you've installed windows place the file on your c: drive. Then edit your boot.ini file to have an entry like this:
C:\linux.bin="Linux"

jmusits · Post by **jmusits** » Wed Apr 07, 2004 7:29 pm

My apologies, I misunderstood what you were trying to accomplish. I think I got it now, you want to install Windows XP on a computer that already has Gentoo installed. And you want it to be a dual boot system right?

sylcordinator did a fine job of explaining the steps of installing Windows after installing Gentoo, pointing out that Windows will remove grub from the MBR and the process of fixing that. Just to put my two cents in: I would reinstall grub as your boot loader since personally I would rather make changes to grub.conf when I am installing a new kernel as opposed to making changes to NTLDR. I just think it is esaier to work with grub and It will save you the time of having to boot into windows to make changes to NTLDR whenever you update you kernel.

As for why your Windows XP CD will not boot, I have no idea, check the BIOS for booting off a CD like slycordinator suggested. If I remember correctly the Windows boot CD requires that you hit enter to boot off the CD or a normal boot will take place. The window for this is only a few seconds, so make sure you are watching the screen at bootup.

Hope this helps and Good luck,

Jason

donkey1984 · Post by **donkey1984** » Thu Apr 08, 2004 12:13 am

i can get it to boot up... but when i get it booted up... it doesnt recongize that there is a hard drive ... and says to check the power... etc... that has been my problem all along ... lol sorry if i was confusing...

vonhelmet · Post by **vonhelmet** » Thu Apr 08, 2004 12:21 am

donkey1984 wrote:i can get it to boot up... but when i get it booted up... it doesnt recongize that there is a hard drive ... and says to check the power... etc... that has been my problem all along ... lol sorry if i was confusing...

You got it fixed then? I was having that exact same problem just earlier, with an XP Pro disc. Weird.

In the end I gave up and installed Win 98 SE (it was happy to boot off a floppy) then installed XP Pro through that. Quite a faff considering I'll hardly use the XP install and will just use Gentoo the whole time once I get that installed!

donkey1984 · Post by **donkey1984** » Fri Apr 09, 2004 6:55 am

no i havent fixed it... but so far no one has been able to help me

jmusits · Post by **jmusits** » Sun Apr 11, 2004 12:18 am

donkey,

I am sorry but I have no idea as to whats going on with your WinXP disc. The only other option I can think of is to install XP before installing gentoo. I believe this is the recommended way (the way I have always seen it done) as linux does a much better job of dealing with Windows than Windows does with linux. Just remember to backup all your inportant files before you start. I wish I had a better solution for you.

[sarcasm]
This sounds like a problem for Microsofts tech support.
[/sarcasm]

Jason

Ben2040 · Post by **Ben2040** » Sun Apr 11, 2004 11:42 am

Hi

I had this exact same problem, w hile ago. I had just upgraded the ATI graphics drivers, and it totally screwed windows up, eg no boot at all, not even an F8 menu. I tried to boot and just got a black screen after "Inspecting hardware".
The only way I managed to fix it was to delete all the extra partitions, and start afresh. Must be something to do with having to many partitions on your drive.

Geez, what a bag of shite....

Ben

gatty1 · Post by **gatty1** » Fri Apr 16, 2004 4:28 pm

I've just experienced the same problem... installed gentoo first then tried to install Windows XP SP1.

A workaround to the problem that solved it for me was turning off the Hard Disk in the BIOS of the system then booting off the XP Install CD. This stopped the CD reading the Hard disk during the initial "detecting your system's hardware" phase, but for some reason (Microsoft trying to be clever I guess), it still found the disk when the drivers get loaded by the installer.

Feel free to try this, would be interesting to know if it works for you too.

xmwxd · Post by **xmwxd** » Wed Nov 23, 2005 6:39 am

gatty1 wrote:I've just experienced the same problem... installed gentoo first then tried to install Windows XP SP1.

A workaround to the problem that solved it for me was turning off the Hard Disk in the BIOS of the system then booting off the XP Install CD. This stopped the CD reading the Hard disk during the initial "detecting your system's hardware" phase, but for some reason (Microsoft trying to be clever I guess), it still found the disk when the drivers get loaded by the installer.

Feel free to try this, would be interesting to know if it works for you too.

I used your method ,and windows XP can be installed ,but I don't know why?

what caused this problem?

augury · Post by **augury** » Thu Nov 24, 2005 1:02 pm

The window police won't let me sell my old windows disks so I've been useing them for other porpuses. One got cut up to use as a piece of plastic to glue onto a broken shelf in my fridge, it didn't hold -- Windows sucks. Another is a shim under a wobbly table, still wobbles. Do you know why?