Computer woes, cont.- now what have I done?

Will this ever end? As I have discussed in a couple of recent threads, I had an "issue" involving my computer here at work. Some malware attacked and rendered Windows unbootable. I decided to get a new hard drive and install XP on it. I did that with no problems and got most of my system back the way I had it before.

Then.... I decided I couldn't just let well enough alone. I put Linux on a partition so that I could boot with either XP or Linux.

Now Linux (Kubuntu) works wonderfully, but it won't start up in Windows. When I turn the computer on, Windows XP is listed as one of the OS choices, but when I choose it, nothing happens. When I boot with Linux, it can see the Winsdows partitiona and can even access data from there.

What could have gone wrong here? How can I get Windows to work again?

What's up with the edit Icon in the bottom left corner of your post?

Paul

Gone now!

LayMeister said:

What's up with the edit Icon in the bottom left corner of your post?

Paul

Click to expand...

Yeah, that's really weird. When I click on that "Edit" button it takes me to the login page for the "Fourthirds" photo forum?

I don't know. I've never seen that before either. Since I seem to be jinxed when it comes to computers, maybe that's just a symptom of my problems.

I would try to reinstall grub if that is what you are using for your bootloader. You can also look in the root directory, /boot/grub/menu.lst I think and manually edit the line toward the bottom in the list of bootable partitions to reflect the correct location for the windows partition.
There is a program that you can download, burn to cd, then boot from it called "super grub" that will reinstall grub, repair grub, etc... I have used it a few times to get me out of a bind....

There is a lot of info here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_GRUB that should help.
Much is distribution-dependent.

McCall St. Brewer said:

What could have gone wrong here? How can I get Windows to work again?

Click to expand...

From Kubuntu do "cat /boot/grub/menu.lst | grep -v '^#'" and paste the results here. Seeing what your bootloader is set to load will help.

Also, could you explain how you partitioned the drives? You mentioned getting a new drive, are you using both the old and the new drive, or do you have a single drive with both XP and Kubuntu on it?

bull8042 said:

I would try to reinstall grub if that is what you are using for your bootloader.

Click to expand...

The fact that he can boot Kubuntu means GRUB is installed and working. It's just misconfigured.

I'm not SURE, but running "sudo update-grub" might auto-detect your WIndows partition and set it up but then, it might totally hose your system so MAKE SURE you backup /boot/grub/menu.lst first.

When I was messing with gentoo I could never get grub to work with vista or xp. I just installed it on a separate hard drive and manually plugged and unplugged. Then I got tired of linux and went back to vista.

Make sure that the XP section of /boot/grub/menu.lst has the chainloader +1 option.