On Thursday 21 September 2006 18:21, Paul Abrahams wrote:
It's fairly straightforward to install Windows and then install Linux. But what is not so straightforward is to do Linux first. I got into that situation because my Windows partition was clobbered but my Linux was still working perfectly. I went through the Windows CD install, but afterwards I got an "invalid partitioning" message when Windows rebooted after the first phase of its install.
I've googled "windows xp install SLE site:lists.suse.com" but could not find anything useful.
To make matters worse, the Windows partition is a logical, not a primary.
Should I just give up and install everything from scratch, Linux as well as Windows? Fortunately this system doesn't yet have any data that I need to preserve.
Paul
You've already received excellent advice from Felix. The UltimateBootCD is well worth the download. It has lots of utilities to fix lots of system problems. Your grub entries for the Win partition have to be exact. I have Win booting off a second drive with the following: title Win2K map (hd0,0) (hd1,0) map (hd1,0) (hd0,0) rootnoverify (hd1,0) makeactive chainloader (hd1,0)+1 map statements rearrange the hard drive and partition order for Windows so Windows won't complain. rootnoverify tells either grub or Windows not to question what its just been told is the root partition. makeactive is for Windows benefit to boot from an active partition. grub can therefor make any partition on any drive 'active' for Window's benefit. chainloader tells Windows where to find its MBR. Your task is to modify the above to reflect your drive/partition settings and see if it works. _IF_ this works, great. If this doesn't work, blast the entire hard drive and start everything over from scratch. Do not save any partitions, delete them all. Install Windows first into a single primary partition. I believe your partition information on this drive is toast. I know you may never be able to prove that it is actually bad. From all that has happened on this drive between hardware faults and software installs I personally would never trust this drive until I totally wiped it clean and started over from scratch. But then, that's just me. Stan