Dual boot, where did I go wrong before I try again please?

pjo123

Hope this is the right place.

I had XP Home running and a few months ago I installed Gentoo. Everything worked great, I spent days compiling things just how I wanted them and I was 100% happy with my Linux install.

Over time my windows system was starting to slow down, so yesterday I made the mistake of trying to re-install XP Home.

I've done this numerous times before with various versions of Linux including about 4 months ago, Gentoo. Last time I simply booted from the XP CD, deleted the XP partition, re-created it, re-installed XP, booted Gentoo off of the CD, mounted the partitions etc and re-installed Grub. Everything worked 100% fine.

This time, as soon as the XP install said words along the lines of `setup is inspecting your system/hardware`, the screen went black and nothing happened. It should go blue and then I press F6 to install my Sata drives. I spent hours on this, tried many many things such as recreating the XP MBR. All to no avail.

The only way I could get the XP setup to run was to delete all partitions from the hard drive. As soon as I did this, the XP setup ran fine. I haven't got a clue why this happened, before I spend further days compiling my Gentoo system again, can anyone point me to the probable cause please?

I had the following configuration.

sda1 NTFS
sda2 FAT32
sda3 /boot
sda5 /swap
sda6 /
sda7 /home

AMD 64 3400+
1.5GB RAM
Sata 160GB
Nvidia 6800 GT 256MB
Asus K8V motherboard

I tried deleting all the partitions except for /home but still no good, I had to delete them all.

thanks

Phil

Jake · Veteran Joined: 31 Jul 2003 Posts: 1132

If the problem partition was 4, your extended partition, you would likely have deleted boot, then when that didn't fix it 5-7 because they can't exist without 4.

Since this is a Windows installation question if I'm understanding it correctly, it should probably have been posted in off the wall.

pjo123 · Posted: Mon Dec 19, 2005 8:00 pm Post subject:

Thanks.

It's a bit of a windows install and a bit of a Gentoo install question

At some point I've done something that windows doesn't like. I'm not sure whether what I did related to windows or my Linux setup.

I don't understand how a partition used for Linux can affect a windows install. It was a while ago when I did the Gentoo install and I'm not sure exactly how I did it (I THINK partition 4 was another primary partition, but I could be wrong). Could it be something to do with me using all available free space for Linux and windows needing a few MB?

I appreciate this topic probably has more to do with XP than Gentoo, but I'm trying not to make the same mistake again.

Many thanks

Phil

Jake · Veteran Joined: 31 Jul 2003 Posts: 1132

pjo123 · Posted: Mon Dec 19, 2005 9:34 pm Post subject:

Many thanks

Phil