[Klug-general] Dual Boot ... assistance please

[Mike]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 09:28:44AM +0000, Paul Lawrence wrote:
> I have a Dell D400 laptop with Win XP that I use for demonstrations and I used the Ubuntu 10.10 live CD to create a dual boot. All was fine. As far as I can tell, after a Ubuntu update, I lost the XP option on startup. Couldn???t see anything on Ubuntu forums to help so I used the live CD to try and repair and ended up creating another Ubuntu partition! A bit fed up with the whole thing I used the Win XP CD to repair Windows but now I can only see the Windows partition. On a 60G drive, I can see 30G. I really don???t want to spend a whole day from scratch reloading XP, patches and SPs if I don???t have to. Aim is to get back to a stable dual boot machine. Back to basics I am sure but would anyone be kind enough to point me on the right track and keep me there?

Sounds like you've made a fine mess of it.  When you did the XP repair
it will have overwritten Grub in the MBR.  I always find bootloaders a
bit fiddly.  I think if you boot off a live CD, mount your root
parition, chroot into it and then run grub-install that should sort you
out.  If you type "grub resuce" or "grub reinstall" into a well known
internet search engine that should give you the finer details.

That of course will probably leave you without the Windows entry in the
grub config but it's really straightforward.  Just give it a name and a
command alone the lines of chainloader.  Basically you're telling Grub
to go off and run the windows bootloader.  "Booting Windows with Grub"
and the aforemented search engine will give you the exact syntax but
it's two lines and I think the only thing you need to change will be the
windows partition.

So, in short, I can't really remember but hopefully that points you in
the right direction!

Mike.
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