[Westwales] Linux with XP

[Colin Sauze]

>
>Having successfully (am I telling this to the world? am I insane? do I have copyright?)
>partitioned the hard drive the day before, I gathered the students and explained that we 
>were now going to install linux to this Windows machine in front of us. Excitedly they
>formed a semi-circle around the designated machine. I chose my trustiest student, a Chinese guy with a passion for computers, a natural geek, and nominated him for the hotseat. I put my old Debian install disk in the drive, and off we went. My student performed like an old hand, followed instructions, understood principles, knew when not to press keys without a tap on the shoulder. Then everything hung. Tried again, still hung, ctrl,alt,F3, corrupted disk.
>  
>
I take it this means corruption of the Linux partition?

This could just be a horrible conincidence of a hardware failure!

>	Now I have a problem, I've got the audience in the palm of my hand, I have promised
>them wonders and have produced a raspberry, they are hot to trot and I am desperate. Soooooo,
>looking in my bag of goodies I produce a RED HAT 6 disk and put it in the drive, why? because
>this disk has never failed me on any machine, thats why! and its the only bastard I've got that will boot and isn't one of these "try it from CD, no compilers, no saving, we're not breaking the GPL, yatta, yatta, yatta". We boot up and we go; thinking this might be a bit tricky, I take over the Pilot's seat. I explain that this will not have a GUI, or be able to connect to the Lan, because of "drivers and stuff like that". At some point I press the wrong button, which button? I cannot recall, it was not the
>'where do you want to install Lilo', I stuck that on a bootdisk, but there was a wrong button press.Never mind, we abort and come back in on the floppy, I show them mc, I show them Emacs, I show them
>how the Unix file system works, they give me ooohs and aaaahs of amazed respect.
>
>	OK, that's it folks, show's over, I whip the boot floppy from the drive and reboot
>to display......................A system message saying that XP is fucked! Did I mention that
>  
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Did the machine previously have linux (or more specifically lilo) on it? 
If not I suspect what you've done is corrupted the bootsector, this is 
recoverable! Try booting up a Windows XP install CD, press "R" to start 
the recovery console. Select the Windows XP installation (there should 
only be one) and enter the administrator password. Then type fixmbr at 
the command prompt. This will restore the boot sector and wipe out Lilo.

Had you tried XP since installing or was this the first try? Can you 
mount the NTFS drive in Linux and see if Linux likes it?