Re: XP CD fails to Boot/XP also fails on Muti-OS System

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Thanks for the follow-up.

John

Swiftmind wrote:

Hello again. I just wanted to close this forum discussion and give others insight into what I did in case another ever has this problem and is searching for a solution.

Well I was able to get the computer running on multiple OS. I had to do some complicated running around but it worked. Even after I got XP installed the XP cd still will not boot the system. I got a Windows 2000 cd to hopefully run chkdsk and alias the cd they gave me was scratched to hell and it could not boot correctly either.

I ended up reformatting the partition and rebuilding the NTFS file system using mkfs.ntfs command in the Linux system rescue disk. I then loaded up PC8 a windows hard disk handler and had it also reformat and rebuild the NTFS just to make sure everything is gone. I then got the idea to copy the partition containing Windows 2000 to the first partition that used to contain WinXP just to see if it will work. If this new Windows2000 did boot up and run, this means it is not a hardware problem with the disk. I had to jump back to the Linux rescue disk because PC8 only allows partition copying into empty space. I used Gparted to copy the Win2k contents into the now empty WinXP partition.

The computer successfully boot into the new Windows2000 when the first partition was sleeted. I could not boot from the WinXP cd so I threw in the XP cd while 2000 was running. Autorun came up and I sleeted complete new install of XP overwriting all contents of Win2000. The installer copied the needed installation files onto the hard disk, I rebooted and selected install WinXP from the list. After that WinXP installed itself as usual and now Windows XP is on the system and running.

WindowsXP did replace the MBR with its own Windows boot program which was expected. I just ran grub-install from the Linux rescue disk using the partition that contained the grub boot files as the root-directory. Grub replaced the MBR and now the system is back and running with all four OS.

Thanks for your help!

.

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