Hey everyone!

I had windows xp installed on my secondary hard drive, and then I installed Mandrake 10.1 on the primary hdd. After playing around with the Mandrake for a while (I am impressed by the way), I tried to get into xp from the boot loader Grub. I get a message saying NTLDR is missing. I now know that by loading Mandrake onto the primary, it formatted it and deleted the startup files. But, I thought that Grub was supposed to be o.k. with that and would send me to the xp drive just fine. I have a start up disk with NTLDR and Ntdetect.com on it, so I think I just need find where to put them so when Grub send the system looking, it will find them. I would really appreciate any help you can give me.

Later:
Adam

Don't get the term bootloader and startup files confused.

By design, XP expects to be the first OS on the primary drive on any system. You should always install XP first on the primary, then Linux second. This solves a lot of issues.

But, let's clarify first. Was your currently "second" hard drive originally the primary? In other words, did you change the jumpers on the drives to make the Windows drive the second hard drive in the system, before installing Mandrake?

Did you install Grub on the Master Boot Record, or a /boot partition?

Try something first. Get into the bios and change the boot sequence setting of the hard drive from HDD0 to HDD1. Save the changes and reboot. Does XP boot without Grub? Let us know and we can proceed.

Hey Danlef!

I did not change the master slave settings. The secondary hdd has always had the xp home on it. When I did it's set up, I knew I was getting Mandrake in the mail so I told it to go on the secondary hdd.And no, I did not install Grub, it was already installed with the Mandrake install. It wrote the MBR for me. I changed the hdd order in the bios, and it did not like that at all. I think xp must have wrote the MBR to the primary, and Mandrake wiped that out. Knowing now that this is the way it wants to be, I could fixboot, but I risk damaging the Mandrake intal, or I guess I could flip the boot sequence and try fixboot and see if it writes a set of boot files what is currently the xp drive. But I was under the understanding that Grub was an extremely useful boot loader, and I would like to be able to use it.

Sorry, it Danleff. Missed an f. opps.

OK, this tells us a lot. So, the MBR for Windows is not on the second hard drive. I believe that your assumption is correct.

I bet you told Windows to install to the second hard drive, but it only installed Windows proper there, not the start-up files.

It created boot on the MBR of the first drive.

You installed Mandrake on the first drive, telling it to use the entire drive for Mandrake?

You then allowed Mandrake to write the MBR to drive 1 (hda)? This is what I meant.

Grub is a fine bootloader, but when you attempt to boot Windows, Windows can't find the startup files, where it expects to find them, on the first hard drive. This is why the usual senario would be to install XP first on the primary, then Linux on the secondary.

I've never done it your way and would have to search around for a fix. Perhaps someone has and has a quick answer. I do know that one user did post his solution a while back, but I don't remember when, or who it was.

before you do fixboot and fixmbr create a linux boot disk or a grub boot disk.
so that if anything goes wrong you can still boot into your linux distro.

adamgdwn, let's try this fix first.

Are you comfortable with editing files using a text editor?

If not, we will try to walk you though it. You will need to edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file.

Change the entry for Windows from;

title windows
root (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1


To the following;

title windows
root (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
map (hd0) (hd1)

map (hd1) (hd0)

Save the file and try rebooting into Windows via Grub.

If this does not work, we will make one more adjustment.

Whoo hoo! Fixed it!

Thanks for the help, but it turned out to be a fairly simple fix. I needed a MSDOS boot disk with NTDETECT.COM and NTLDR on them. After I realized that it was looking on the right hdd, just in the wrong directory (you were right on the mark when you prescribed a virtual flip Danleff, Grub had already done that for me), I copied these two files directly to the C: from the dos window. It is important not to allow it to go to c:\windows or it will never get a chance to read them. If you start up with the windows install disk, and go to the recovery console, it automatically sends copied files into the windows directory. So now I have Mandrake fully occupying the primary hdd and xp completely confined to the secondary hdd. 8) I get a boot.ini error, but it does not affect the boot up and I can tweak that out later.
Thanks for the time. I tend to do thingd, then break it, then learn how, then fix. A bit of a challenge sometimes, but it solidifies the learning ( I belive they call it an experiential learner).
Thanks again for the help, I'll keep watching and maybe pass on any other things I might find.

Later:
Adamgdwn

Great! that's the ticket.

1. If the file(s) were present at all where XP thought that they should be...and

2. Grub looking in the right place.

So, the problem is solved with some basic infomation and nudging with your ability to troubleshoot the problem.

Nice job!

Sorry to revive this old thread, but I'm having the same problem adamgdwn had, and danleff said something about another step that could be taken if that didn't work. Here's my entry for Windows:

title Windows XP
root (hd1,0)
makeactive
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
chainloader +1

I'm using Ubuntu, and the thing about this is it was working yesterday! I installed a new update (it updated the kernel) and it overwrote my old menu.lst with a new one that didn't have my entry for windows XP in it! The one that worked was automatically set up by Ubuntu when I installed it.

Please help.
Thanks
-Nate

Did you try adding the above entry for Windows to the menu.lst file?