Oops, I borked my mother-in-law's computer

[VariEze]

Hi,
I too have been poking around the Forum trying to find step by step instructions to dual boot puppy and XP, starting with an XP install on an NTFS formatted drive. I wanted a boot manager, not floppy or cd boot because It's been a pain to wait for XP to boot all the way and shut down, if the CD didn't get put in the drive, by mistake, and booting to pupy was intended.

I ended up just going for it, and ended up with a disaster. I di d this on my Mother-in-law's computer, yesterday, and I'm home now, so I don't have all the error message details. Here's what I did, maybe somebody can figure out how I went wrong.

Puppy 2.16.1, windows XP, compaq 3.2ghz machine, 80g hd NTFS.

I booted pupy to ram (pfix=ram), and used gparted to make a 5g ex2 partition at the end or the drive.

I then used the puppy universal installer to put an option 1 install onto the new partition (/dev/hda2)

I let the grub installer run at the end of the installer, and put it in the MBR.

I now have a computer that won't boot at all. (except with the live CD) The Grub menu comes up, but choosing the XP option yields a screen with 3 lines echoing what grub puts out, then it hangs. ( I can't remember exactly what the 3 lines are) If I choose the Puppy Menu entry, It starts to boot, then has a Kernel Panic, can't sync.... something ( I know that it's hard to help if I don't have all the info, but I'm 50 miles away now.)

I tried to reverse the damage with the Compaq rescue CD, but it has no command line option that will let me run fixmbr, so I have to find a boot Cd that has fixmbr on it. I also read that the Grub installer saves a backup MBR, but I tried the installer twice, so I probably overwrote the backup. (boy did I screw up!) To make things worse I let the Rescue disk repair run, hoping it would let me do a comand, instead it went ahead and replaced all files, effectively uninstalling all applications in XP, but it didn't fix the MBR!

Once I fix the MBR, I'd still like to have a dual boot machine with a boot manager. any help would be appreciated.

--Karl

[Bruce B]

Karl,

Is she still your mother-in-law? Does you wife still live with you? Need help finding an attorney?

If you can't find an XP boot cd, if you can't run XP, you can still use a Windows 98 bootable cd or MS-DOS W98 floppy disk with fdisk on it. This can be made from a Windows 98 computer.

Once booted, command is:

fdisk /mbr

The original mbr was located in /dev/hda2/boot/grub along with instructions to restore it. But it sounds like that partition is gone.

The practical difference between the XP MBR and the Windows 98 MBR is different error messages, but hopefully you won't have errors.

Persistence pays.

Bruce

[VariEze]

Good tip. I know I have a windows 2000 setup disk around here somewhere, that should do it.

The best thing about Puppy is that after all my floundering, it still boots off the cd, and all the pictures and music on the NTFS partition are still available. (and I get to keep my head).

I see on some other forums, (ubuntu) people recommend adding the linux boot info to the windows bootloader. This may be a solution too, if I can figure out the details.

--Karl

[Bruce B]

I see on some other forums, (ubuntu) people recommend adding the linux boot info to the windows bootloader. This may be a solution too, if I can figure out the details.

There are a few ways to do this. I was hoping you'd take it a step at a time, some of this stuff is NOT in the least bit intitutive, especially things like booting Linux from the Windows bootloader.

There are already posts on this forum on various ways how to do it. The problem is locating them.

[MU]

http://bootdisk.com/

Mark

[John Doe]

fixmbr \Device\HardDisk0

or just

fixmbr

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/docu ... x?mfr=true

I think 2k is the same.

[VariEze]

Thanks all for the help in fixing the XP MBR. I'll probably go down there in a week or so, armed with all the above, and get it going again. Also a friend made me a Bart's PE disk a couple years back, that may have fixmbr on it too.

I'd like to set up XP on a machine I have here, and figure out how to get this dual boot thing working, but I just looked at e-bay, and XP with a COA is $120.00! I might be better off getting a whole machine here locallly off Craigs list, with a COA sticker. Crazy, the OS is worth more than the computer!

--Karl

Oh, yeh, I had to look up 'borked' although the context defines it.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=borked

You guys think this is funny.... ha ha... (in good humor)

[keilor]

Once you have XP going again here's a good way to dual boot that doesn't alter the MBR: THE Lin'N'WinNewB PROJECT.

I have used this successfully.
__

[ol_smokey]

Hi there,

I just had a similar problem after an attempted Ubuntu install. The XP files were untouched it's just that the machine wasn't booting from the hard drive.
I checked Gparted and all that I needed to do was reset the boot flag in Gparted.

If your XP files are still there and appear untouched try this first.

smokey

[Sage]

Be sure not to use the fdisk for /mbr issued with W98. You need to get the new version from the evil one's website which copes with larger HD sizes and one or two other refinements. Once you've recovered access to 'doze, you can use the standalone GRUB installer from the menu to regain Puppy access as well.
Frankly, I cannot see the benefit of dual booting these days. Caddies for the desktop if you've only got one; otherwise, separate boxes for separate OSes. Any old junk PC lurking under the bed, in a roadside skip can be deployed for a compact distro like Puppy. Perhaps even a stack of USB sticks or CF memory for compact OSes?

[tony]

I would get back to basics and start here :-

http://grub4dos.jot.com/WikiHome

or here :-

http://wellminded.com/puppy/pupsearch.html

I have grub installed on my first hard disk with XP.

On booting I am given a choice of XP or linux. On choosing Linux I get a list of systems installed on the several partitions I have on the second hard disk.

Points to watch with grub is how it defines disks and partitions, they both start at 0.

Also it picks up from the first menu.lst it finds so be careful when deleting partitions to make way for a new install.

Regards Tony

[twodees]

I'm dual booting XP and Puppy 2.14 on an old Dell p3 laptop. I could be mistaken, but I credit the success at installing GRUB for the dual boot to following a suggestion on Raffy's site concerning opening the boot folder in XP first and making it writeable.

I did pretty much as you did with the partitioning, leaving most of the hard drive space devoted to the NTFS partition for XP and taking only a small bite for Linux partitions. The autoinstaller did the rest. Here are a couple of links that may help:

http://ph-islands.net/pupinstall/winxp.php

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=18583

Maybe if you get the XP files restored and decide to do a reinstall of your puppy, some of this will help. The second link is to a thread containing comments from some well-informed puppy users who explain things much better than I can. Enjoy Puppy and good luck patching things up with your Mother-in-law.

[VariEze]

Thanks, All. I'll probably go with the method of leaving the MBR alone, and editing the boot.ini, like keilor or twodees suggests. All assuming I can get the MBR fixed. I found an XP install CD w/o coa that should get things fixed up.

It would be cool if there was a "do you want to boot from the CD" prompt presented by Puppy, and be able to say "no" and boot to windows. That way you could leave the CD in all the time, not having to worry about forgetting to put it in.

Anybody have an Idea how hard this would be to implement? GRUB on the MBR of the CD? is that possible?

--Karl

[twodees]

It would be cool if there was a "do you want to boot from the CD" prompt presented by Puppy, and be able to say "no" and boot to windows. That way you could leave the CD in all the time, not having to worry about forgetting to put it in.

Anybody have an Idea how hard this would be to implement? GRUB on the MBR of the CD? is that possible?

--Karl

The opening lines in the bootup screen of the 2.14CD gives you several optional commands for booting. You just need to be quick at typing in "puppy" and hitting the space bar to pause the bootup while you decide which command to use.

I was doing that for awhile before deciding to go ahead with the HD install. Hope it all works out for you.