I think we DESPERATLY need a grub/winXP newbie HowTo

[Tudor Oprea]

On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 17:51:43 -0400, Mike Clark <mike.clark at hamot.org> wrote:
> 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.

Mmm... I don't know about "odd reasons" - there is really nothing odd
about my setup, nor did I touch my windows partition during the
install process.  I had WinXP on /dev/hda1, and three linux partitions
from an old Debian install: /boot on /dev/hda2, / on /dev/hda3, and
swap on /dev/hda4.  In the installer, I told grub to use those
partitions in the same way..  Next time I tried to boot into XP, I got
the "NTLDR not found" error.  Booting from the WinXP disk and using
"fixmbr" did nothing.  Copying NTLDR from the cd to the root directory
likewise did nothing.  The fix described above finally restored access
to it.

Rather than fsck around with that anymore, I booted into Ubuntu from a
recovery CD, uninstalled grub, and installed lilo.  All's well now,
but it was definitely not a happy couple of hours.  Given that this
has been a known issue for a while, there should definitely be
something in the install docs about it.