I think we DESPERATLY need a grub/winXP newbie HowTo

[Mike Clark]

I have done numerous XP/Grub installs and Ive never had a problem. If
your referring to the fedora debacle with grub and making XP not
bootable that has been fixed. It wasnt Distro Specific, it was a kernel
issue. Lets say for some odd reason it does 'trash your windows install'
just look up fedora/xp dual boot fix and you will find that this command
fixes it completely. (sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread -H255
/dev/hda) The site with this info is http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/ . If
you ever want to wipe the MBR and start over, get rid of LILO of GRUB.
Just boot to your XP cd and type 'fixmbr' at the prompt. Reboot and your
back to your lovely XP install. Honestly tho, when you are partitioning
for your UBUNTU install do not touch the partition that reads NTFS/DOS
and you will be fine. Thats all.  



>>> Ben Edwards <funkytwig at gmail.com> 10/27/2004 4:55:01 PM >>>
I have been hanging around the IRC channel a little bit as well as
keeping an eye on the User List.  I am increasingly getting the idea
doing a dual boot Ubuntu-WinXP install is a VERY bad idea.  I think it
is something to do with the difference in which grub and windows
addresses disk space - in lilo this was not a problem.

This is a real problem because a lot of windows users wanting who want
to try Ubuntu will try this and lose access to there Windows
partition.    this is something that needs addressing - The headline
'Ubuntu trashed my Windows machine' send chills up my spine.

This is not just a WinXP issue - someone at our local LUG wanted to
try Ubuntu.  they previously had SusE and had real grub problems -
they posted to the user list and did not get a reply.

A Newbie, who is not used to using mailing lists and IRC may well
panic - swear and reinstall windows.

Indeed a lot of the grub / WinXP problems are not getting responses on
the Mailing list - I am sending people to IRC but this is not ideal -
for one thing the answers are not being archived.

So I think we need a WinXP & a grub howto/troubleshooting document for
Newbees - and possibly a what to do if have problems installing dual
boot.

Currently the wiki is being frozen while it is migrated to a new
system.  I am not technical enough to write the document but if
someone wanted to volunteer and send it to me I will make sure your
work is not wasted (I am posting this to the user/ devl and docs list,
those on the docs list obviously do not need to post it to me but it
would be good if they could tell me if they are doing this).

Ben Edwards
Documentation Team 

PS apologies to the moderator of the devel list - could you please
moderate this through
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