I installed gentoo before windows. Oops?

Schizoid · Apprentice Joined: 11 Apr 2003 Posts: 267

Last week I got a new pc and I installed windows on it to see how some fancy new games ran.

Two days later I formatted and installed gentoo. I left 10gb on the end of my drive (/dev/hda7) to install windows on which I am trying to do now.

When I boot from the XP cd it just sits there at a blank screen after I "press a key to boot from the windows xp cd."

This is a bit confusing as I of course have the exact same hardware as last week and it worked fine then. The only difference is the hard drive has linux on it instead of being blank.

Is this really what is stopping me here? I assume it is something else (but I can't imagine what). The MS knowledge base wasn't any help and I can't seem to get the gentoo forum search function to respond so excuse me if this has been covered.

Thanks for any help.

mattjgalloway · l33t Joined: 16 Mar 2004 Posts: 761 Location: Coventry, UK

Mmmm.....

Installing windows after Linux can be a painful task, but I've done it lots of times - I just hate to see windows see my drives before linux does - it's just not right for windows to be first!

Erm, have you tried disabling the harddrive just to see if you can boot from the CD then? Maybe your CD is knackered you see - doubtful, but give it a try.

Second thing I can thing of is try adding a grub line in your grub config to make it boot the CD - you might need to use "chainloader +1" in there. So something like:

tSp · Posted: Thu Jul 29, 2004 10:22 pm Post subject:

as a system builder/service tech, I have seen this happen a lot booting a windows xp cd if the cd has even a slight fingerprint or very slight scratch on it.....

first time it happened, I felt really embarrassed thinking that a new oem xp disk was defective, calling ms tech support, and having the guy tell me to remove cd from drive, wipe it off on your pants leg, reinstall it and reboot......fixed it and I felt about 1 inch tall right then.

check it out and look
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Schizoid · Apprentice Joined: 11 Apr 2003 Posts: 267

I got it to boot now and it goes into the windows setup. When I am asked to pick a partition to install to I pick the last partion (hda7) and it bluescreens with some error about setupdd.sys.

hda7 is the last 30gb of a 250gb drive. Is this the problem? I have service pack 1 slipstreamed so it has 48bit LBA or whatever that is so it sees the full 250gb. Maybe windows doesnt like being installed inside an extended partition?

So now I am thinking of installing windows on a < 30gb partition on a fresh drive and then trying to use dd later on to copy the install over to the end of the 250gb drive? Does this sound at all feasible?

Thanks for your help guys. I know this is a windows problem and not a gentoo problem so I am grateful you didn't just blow me off. To be honest I haven't had windows installed in over a year and I am only doing this to test out my new graphics card (6800GT

).

cyrillic · Posted: Fri Jul 30, 2004 2:00 am Post subject:

mattjgalloway · l33t Joined: 16 Mar 2004 Posts: 761 Location: Coventry, UK

Roger that - you need to be on a primary partition.

hda7 is way too far down the list. Perhaps you could move around the partitions a bit using parition magic or something.... otherwise, get a 2nd hard drive to install windows on - that's often the easiest anyway
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Schizoid · Apprentice Joined: 11 Apr 2003 Posts: 267

ah crap

. I got the dd to work perfectly and I can mount hda7 and see all the files. I just assumed I would have to change this line in the boot.ini:

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

I can't just change that to a seven eh? lol

Ah well, it was worth a shot.