is there any prob with a windows xp and linux dual boot system?

[iamroot 0]

I'm currently using winodws xp home and red hat 8.0. When i started using it was fine but later on, windows started getting all kinds of problems and in the end said my config.ini file was corrupted and asked me to repair my installation. Can some one help me out here if its my hard drive prob or anything else?

[danleff 0]

Give us a little more information about the install of RedHat.

 

1. Is Windows XP on a NTFS partition or fat32?

 

2. Is RedHat installed in the same drive as XP? Or, do you have two physical drives on the system, one for XP and one foe RedHat?

 

3. Did you set up a partition ahead of time with a partitioning utility, such as PartitionMagic, or did you use RedHat's install partitioning utility during the install?

 

4/. Most importantly, did you defrag your XP partition(s) BEFORE installing RedHat?

 

5. Finally, what system is the install on? Is it a HP or Compaq system?

[iamroot 0]

My windows xp is on an ntfs partition, both my win xp and linux is on the same physical drive and i used red -hat's auto partition option. My system is custom - made.

[danleff 0]

The problem most likely is that one or more of your windows programs got caught in the partitioning process. Win XP has a habit of leaving some files at the end of the partition. Before installing any Linux distro, or changing/resizing your partitions, you should run defrag in Windows first. If you ran "analyze" in the defrag utility before the install, you probably would have seen files scattered toward the end of the drive's partition.

 

When you ran the partitioning program in RedHat, did you have free space on the drive that you claimed, or did you tell redHat to use remaining free/unclaimed space on the Windows partition?

 

What program are you trying to run when this message appears?

 

Also, what other problems with Windows have you seen?

[jimf43 0]

1) I'm confused... In a normal XP installation, there is no 'config.ini'.

2) Did you try running the XP repair?

[danleff 0]

That's why I'm thinking that one of his win programs got caught in the partitioning process. So, it's the win.ini of an application that is giving the message, not windows in general.