Grub, Gentoo, WinXP

Guest · Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2002 1:31 pm Post subject: Grub, Gentoo, WinXP

Hi there,

I installed Gentoo on my IBM Thinkpad A31. Everything went fine so far -- Gentoo's booting and working like a charm, though windows XP doesn't boot anymore (error messages are listed below, as well as the grub config and the partitioning table).

I searched google for it, with the result of few answers. The MS support-page says that a configuration file's been overwritten, and that you should reinstall XP. Though, a reinstallation would result in an overwritten MBR and therefore a deleted grub.
As IBM installs windows with two partitions as default (one NTFS for Windows, and one FAT32 partition as for the recovery partition), I wondered if the XP-bootloader's maybe in the FAT32 partition, and changed the grub configuration -- to no extend. The bootloader's definitely residing in the NTFS partition.

I can't figure that some XP-file has been overwritten as I didn't touch the XP-reliant partitions. Under XP, I resized the NTFS partition with Partition Magic and activated a new ext2 one. Everything was working so far, I rebooted, popped in the Gentoo CD and installed everything. During the fdisk-part I just created one primary partition as for the /boot, one extended, and 5 logical partitions. I didn't even touch the windows stuff.

My grub configuration is like the following:

jadenjahner · n00b Joined: 04 May 2002 Posts: 28

Try adding makeactive to the list for XP. I had this issue when XP was on a logical partition.
_________________
I can't think of anything catchy to put here, so I'll just leave it blank.

MaRTiaN · Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2002 2:56 pm Post subject:

If you have to reinstall XP, once you've finished, just pop in the gentoo boot CD, activate the console, mount the gentoo partitions, chroot over to them and reinstall Grub as per the install instructions.

As you can probably guess I reinstall Win98 much more than I do gentoo

_________________
Some people are alive only because it's illegal to kill them.

Guest · Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2002 3:13 pm Post subject:

Thank you so much for that hint!

OK, also windows' booting now. Although makeactive didn't work (standing alone, that is), I rechecked my partitioning table, and remarked and wondered about the "hidden NTFS".

Well, as long as a partition is hidden, you can't boot it. So I set the menu.lst up as follows: