Hello everyone, well im a newbie at linux basically. I just installed SUSE 9 pro and the boot loader runs fine and linux runs fine. The only problem is when i go to load windows xp it doesnt load. I get the windows xp logo like its gonna start loading then it flashes blue and restarts. I thought about reinstalling windows xp but i remember with past versions of linux that if i install windows it will override the boot and i wont be able to boot linux. If you know a fix that will prevent me from reinstalling everything all over again i would appreciate it.

Thanks in advanced

can anyone please help me out? i have read post and i dont see the exact same problem, i think its pretty simple to fix with the right knowledge.

How are your disks partitioned?

I have 1 160gb HD it is partitioned with a windows xp partition, another partition i made for storage, and a linux partition.

Does /boot/grub/menu.lst say something like

rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

for winxp ?

thats what the file says,

K the bootloader is configured properly, I'm not exactly sure why you're having that problem, could be something to do with the partitioning proccess, or GRUB in the mbr.
My suggestion at this point is that make a Suse bootdisk, boot with windows XP cd into the recovery console and do a fixmbr, see if that gets you back into Windows.

Im gonna try that out thanks for your help.

Hi,

I have exactly the same problem. I just installed Suse 9.1 Pro.

Windows XP was on the HDD, but I inserted Suse DVD (it's the 64-bit version if that makes a difference), and it told me that it wanted to repartition the disc etc. I didn't see a problem with it's choices, so I just selected Accept, and it did it's business.

Everything installed smoothly. It changed the disc with Windows on the first partition, the swap disc on the second (I think) and Linux on the third (again I think... the last two could be the other way round).

Linux boots up great, and it installed GRUB which lets me choose which OS I want to use (Linux the default cos eventually I intend to just use this, but want XP in the mean time).

If I select Windows from the GRUB menu, everything appears to be going swimmingly. As the other post said, the XP boot screen comes up as if it were loading, and the little scroll bar scrolls across. Then suddenly without warning I see a brief glims of a blue error screen and the system re-boots, with the same senario every time.

Any ideas? And did icewater246 get the error fixed?

Thanks.

BTW, I doubt it makes much difference, but the HDD is a SATA drive.

Anyone?

I just installed 9.1 personal, which is a lot cheaper, you rich so and so, aand I have no problems. Windows.... wwelll.... That's a different story , but it works now. BTW Ice water, What I did was reinstall windows (I didn't have the same problem, the problem was diffferent, but still preventing me from loading XP), and then XP would boot up, no loader for linux though. Then i just installed over the linux partition with SuSe again, and it worked great. I really don't advice installing new windows over your old one without formatting, unless you wanna get data from the old hardrive, when you've done that, format, and start a fresh XP. I know it sounds tedious but well, unless you get XP fixed I can't really recommend anything else :/. Good Luck !

My problem is the damn SATA HDD... it's a right nightmare. Because of that, windows setup doesn't detect the HDD and therefore tells me that there is nothing it can do. I've got to root out the drivers for the drive. Grrr.... I think I'll just do a fixmbr when I get it working and see if that helps.

If anyone has any advise, I'd be grateful.

I've now really made a mess of things!

I found the SATA drivers (I knew I had them on floppy somewhere) and got windows XP cd to start and recognise the drive. I then did a recovery and ran fixmbr. I was told I was using a non-standard boot method, and that changing the mbr might cause problems, but told it to continue anyway.

It corrected the MBR and now I can't boot into Suse, and still have the same problem when booting into Windows.

So I'm now running Suse install again, and repairing the Suse install so I at least have one usable OS.

I'll post my findings!

Right, well... I've not re-installed Suse fine. I just repaired the installation and it booted fine first time, which is fantastic. But it looks like I'm going to have to write over the old Windows partition.

I also found that when I went into the XP install, it thinks that the windows partition is empty. I'm not sure if it just only displays the size of the disc, but it did say free space and then the total size of the disc. I'm wondering if Suse didn't touch the MBR on the last install, but deleted the FAT. I'm presuming that NTFS uses file allocation tables of some sort. It surely must!

I've got 5 partitions
1- XP NTFS
2- OS Share FAT32
3- Linux Ext2
4- Linux boot Ext2
5- Linux Swapfile

I downloaded SuSE 9.0 onto Fat32 from XP. I created the boot CD and booted from the boot.iso CD. I pointed the cd to install from the Hard drive and it installed everything. It asked me to partition and it had already detected my partitions so I let it proceed to just reformat my existing partitions. It installed my bootloader and set it up perfectly.

I think I'm going to buy SuSE9.1 pro because the 9.0 download is just personal and I need pro to compile programs.

I used Partition Magic to partition my harddrive and it did it with ease. I think Partition Magic is totally worth having because it does your partitioning around Windows so Windows doesnt complain.

As a suggestion, I would try to see what your blue screen says before your Xp restarts. There's gotta be something XP cant find or doesnt like.
You're right too because if you reinstall XP your MBR gets reinstated. What you should do before you do that is keep your bootloader record and add your linux bootloader info to your boot.ini file and just use the Windows bootloader?
Anyway, just a suggestion and thought I'd give input on how I did everything.