Serious Boot Problems - Unbootable XP

Unidan · 04-22-2005, 07:27 AM

I tried installing 2k Pro on a seperate partition on the same drive I installed XP and Mandrake 64. Everything was fine and dandy and 2k runs great. Unfortunately I found out the boot menu Mandrake installed is gone, and the menu 2k installed won't let me boot XP. When I try and boot XP, it says it's starting to boot 2k. After about 5% it says I need to get a repair disk and fix it. So, I go back into 2k and make a disk, come back, start the repair with the 2k disk and the repair floppy. Lo and behold, I get the blue screen of death.

So, here I am. Have I screwed myself over? Do I have to uninstall 2k and reinstall XP? I would prefer to keep all the OS' on my system, please help.

**norin** · 04-22-2005, 08:33 AM

windows is a dirty OS that likes to Overwrite MBRs of ALL other OSs this means even if you have another MS OS on your system. if you dual boot with another MS OS the newere OS will overwrite the Master Boot Record, i am not sure if you can use a seperate BootLoader such as the ones Linux uses like LILO or GRUB to change this.

however i can suggest this. this may or may not work, since you overwrote the MBR, maybe not intentionally but it happens

right click My computer, then select properties, and hit the advanced tab
in the startup and recovery box click settings, change that so it will display the list of OSs for 30 secs or so. then reboot to see if it works.

Unidan · 04-22-2005, 09:07 AM

Yes, when I first installed 2k it showed both XP Home and 2k Pro as options, I lengthened the time to 5 seconds. I don't think you understand my problem. When I try to boot with the XP option it thinks that it's 2k and says it's broken.

Unidan · 04-22-2005, 10:29 AM

Great, even more problems, I tried doing the fixboot thing with the 2k disc. So it wouldn't write to partitions d: or e:, probably because they're on the SATA drive. So I try and write to c:, which is a FAT32 partition of my PATA disk, and when I start 2000 now it's all "hey! this is the wrong disk! *** mate!", yet I can still start it.

04-22-2005, 07:27 AM	#1 (permalink)
Unidan Registered User Join Date: Apr 2005 Posts: 3 OS: 2k/XP/Linux	Serious Boot Problems - Unbootable XP I tried installing 2k Pro on a seperate partition on the same drive I installed XP and Mandrake 64. Everything was fine and dandy and 2k runs great. Unfortunately I found out the boot menu Mandrake installed is gone, and the menu 2k installed won't let me boot XP. When I try and boot XP, it says it's starting to boot 2k. After about 5% it says I need to get a repair disk and fix it. So, I go back into 2k and make a disk, come back, start the repair with the 2k disk and the repair floppy. Lo and behold, I get the blue screen of death. So, here I am. Have I screwed myself over? Do I have to uninstall 2k and reinstall XP? I would prefer to keep all the OS' on my system, please help.

04-22-2005, 08:33 AM	#2 (permalink)
norin TSF Veteran Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: L-Town, Maine Posts: 1,748 OS: WinXP Pro SP3 My System	windows is a dirty OS that likes to Overwrite MBRs of ALL other OSs this means even if you have another MS OS on your system. if you dual boot with another MS OS the newere OS will overwrite the Master Boot Record, i am not sure if you can use a seperate BootLoader such as the ones Linux uses like LILO or GRUB to change this. however i can suggest this. this may or may not work, since you overwrote the MBR, maybe not intentionally but it happens right click My computer, then select properties, and hit the advanced tab in the startup and recovery box click settings, change that so it will display the list of OSs for 30 secs or so. then reboot to see if it works. __________________

04-22-2005, 09:07 AM	#3 (permalink)
Unidan Registered User Join Date: Apr 2005 Posts: 3 OS: 2k/XP/Linux	Yes, when I first installed 2k it showed both XP Home and 2k Pro as options, I lengthened the time to 5 seconds. I don't think you understand my problem. When I try to boot with the XP option it thinks that it's 2k and says it's broken.

04-22-2005, 10:29 AM	#4 (permalink)
Unidan Registered User Join Date: Apr 2005 Posts: 3 OS: 2k/XP/Linux	Great, even more problems, I tried doing the fixboot thing with the 2k disc. So it wouldn't write to partitions d: or e:, probably because they're on the SATA drive. So I try and write to c:, which is a FAT32 partition of my PATA disk, and when I start 2000 now it's all "hey! this is the wrong disk! *** mate!", yet I can still start it.