XP CD fails to Boot/XP also fails on Muti-OS System

[Guest]

Hello.

I have been assigned to fix this computer at my work. It is a new computer
we are making that will contain 4 OSs; Red Hat 5 Enterprise Linux, Windows
Vista Business, Windows XP and Windows 2000. The OS to boot up is selected by
using Grub. The hard drive is partitioned into 6 partitions. Xp is located on
the 0 partition, Vista on 1, Win2000 on 2, Red hat on 4. IT installed all the
software but now there is a problem so they threw it at me, the new intern...

Red Hat, Vista and Xp all worked fine and boot up correctly. But once
Windows 2000 was installed XP no longer works. Now all the OSs installed work
except for Windows Xp. Through my two day online research I discovered that
you should install Window OS in order of oldest to newest (2000 then XP then
Vista). It seems IT did not know about this which is why we now have this
problem.

Grub reports an invalid device when it tries to boot up Widows XP (the grub
commands are correct). We figure the boot sector or the MBR was overwritten
by Window2000's. So I need to fix this. But the biggest problem is the
Windows XP CD fails to boot from the BIOS. This CD has been used on other
systems and successfully boots from BIOS and opens the recovery console. Also
other boot CDs work on this system, only the Windows XP boot CD fails. On
this system the BIOS sees the CD and starts it. I get the message “Checking
hardware integrity†or something similar. After a few seconds this message
disappears and the computer just sits there at a blank screen. The CD Rom
stops and nothing runs.

I can not repair/install anything within the XP partition because I can not
access the recovery console or installation setup. I did boot up from a Linux
System Rescue CD and ran TestDisk. It checked the boot sector and its backup
and reported that they were the same. I listed out the contents of the
partition and I did see all the files of the windows installation.

But I may have made things worse. Note all these problems were already
occurring before this. In TestDisk it asked to check/repair the MBR. I said
yes thinking it would check and leave it alone if it was fine. It seems it
rewrote the MBR and now TestDisk can not see the files in the XP partition. I
think all I need to do is get the recovery console and run chkdisk but as
stated above I still can not get the XP CD to boot. I tried again after I
'repaired' the MBR and the same problems still exist.

So I need help in figuring out why the XP CD fails to boot. Is there a way
to fix this while leaving the other partitions of the hard drive alone?

Any help is appreciated.

 

[John John]

Hello.

I have been assigned to fix this computer at my work. It is a new computer
we are making that will contain 4 OSs; Red Hat 5 Enterprise Linux, Windows
Vista Business, Windows XP and Windows 2000. The OS to boot up is selected by
using Grub. The hard drive is partitioned into 6 partitions. Xp is located on
the 0 partition, Vista on 1, Win2000 on 2, Red hat on 4. IT installed all the
software but now there is a problem so they threw it at me, the new intern...

Red Hat, Vista and Xp all worked fine and boot up correctly. But once
Windows 2000 was installed XP no longer works. Now all the OSs installed work
except for Windows Xp. Through my two day online research I discovered that
you should install Window OS in order of oldest to newest (2000 then XP then
Vista). It seems IT did not know about this which is why we now have this
problem.

Grub reports an invalid device when it tries to boot up Widows XP (the grub
commands are correct). We figure the boot sector or the MBR was overwritten
by Window2000's. So I need to fix this. But the biggest problem is the
Windows XP CD fails to boot from the BIOS. This CD has been used on other
systems and successfully boots from BIOS and opens the recovery console. Also
other boot CDs work on this system, only the Windows XP boot CD fails. On
this system the BIOS sees the CD and starts it. I get the message “Checking
hardware integrity†or something similar. After a few seconds this message
disappears and the computer just sits there at a blank screen. The CD Rom
stops and nothing runs.

I can not repair/install anything within the XP partition because I can not
access the recovery console or installation setup. I did boot up from a Linux
System Rescue CD and ran TestDisk. It checked the boot sector and its backup
and reported that they were the same. I listed out the contents of the
partition and I did see all the files of the windows installation.

But I may have made things worse. Note all these problems were already
occurring before this. In TestDisk it asked to check/repair the MBR. I said
yes thinking it would check and leave it alone if it was fine. It seems it
rewrote the MBR and now TestDisk can not see the files in the XP partition. I
think all I need to do is get the recovery console and run chkdisk but as
stated above I still can not get the XP CD to boot. I tried again after I
'repaired' the MBR and the same problems still exist.

So I need help in figuring out why the XP CD fails to boot. Is there a way
to fix this while leaving the other partitions of the hard drive alone?

Any help is appreciated.

Replace the files ntldr and ntdetect with the Windows XP versions. Copy
the files from the XP cd to the system partition. In a multiboot
environment when you install Windows 2000 after Windows XP it replaces
these files with the earlier version and the Windows 2000 version of
these files cannot boot Windows XP.

John

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your quick responce.

That makes sense. I just tried it using the System Rescue CD, I was able to
mount the partion but I cant do anything with it. The NTFS is corrupt, most
likely from me repairing the MBR. Thus when I tried to throw in the two files
you mentioned it just gave me a few errors within the NTFS code. It was
looking for the dir index I think. The errors stated I need to run chkdisk
which is located on the Win XP cd. I assume it will just look at the disk and
update the MBR with its current state. But I still cant get the thing to boot
from the CD.

Do you know of another way to run chkdsk in this situation?
Or is there another thing I can do? Perhaps some type of program I can boot
up from?

I was thinking of maybe seeing if I could get the Windows 2000 CD and use
chkdsk on that. Then try to mount the XP partition but I am not sure if this
is doable.

 

[John John]

The Windows 2000 CD & Recovery Console should be able to run a chkdsk on
the disk (even though XP & 2000 have a different NTFS version). Other
options would be to use a Bart PE disk or to mount the disk in another
computer. If you are getting error messages telling you that the NTFS
structure is corrupt in my opinion if the disk cannot be mounted or if
chkdsk cannot correct the problems you may as well bite the bullet and
format the disk.

John

 

[Guest]

Hello again. I just wanted to close this forum discussion and give others
insight into what I did in case another ever has this problem and is
searching for a solution.

Well I was able to get the computer running on multiple OS. I had to do some
complicated running around but it worked. Even after I got XP installed the
XP cd still will not boot the system. I got a Windows 2000 cd to hopefully
run chkdsk and alias the cd they gave me was scratched to hell and it could
not boot correctly either.

I ended up reformatting the partition and rebuilding the NTFS file system
using mkfs.ntfs command in the Linux system rescue disk. I then loaded up PC8
a windows hard disk handler and had it also reformat and rebuild the NTFS
just to make sure everything is gone. I then got the idea to copy the
partition containing Windows 2000 to the first partition that used to contain
WinXP just to see if it will work. If this new Windows2000 did boot up and
run, this means it is not a hardware problem with the disk. I had to jump
back to the Linux rescue disk because PC8 only allows partition copying into
empty space. I used Gparted to copy the Win2k contents into the now empty
WinXP partition.

The computer successfully boot into the new Windows2000 when the first
partition was sleeted. I could not boot from the WinXP cd so I threw in the
XP cd while 2000 was running. Autorun came up and I sleeted complete new
install of XP overwriting all contents of Win2000. The installer copied the
needed installation files onto the hard disk, I rebooted and selected
install WinXP from the list. After that WinXP installed itself as usual and
now Windows XP is on the system and running.

WindowsXP did replace the MBR with its own Windows boot program which was
expected. I just ran grub-install from the Linux rescue disk using the
partition that contained the grub boot files as the root-directory. Grub
replaced the MBR and now the system is back and running with all four OS.

Thanks for your help!

 

[John John]

Thanks for the follow-up.

John