suse 10 dual boot with xp on a laptop prob

[terry712]

i have a dell c840 - it's at latest bios revision admittedly this is over 12 months ago.
it was dual booting with suse 9.3 and xp
i have completed a new installation so that it zapped the 9.3.
it installs ok and as long as i only use suse then it's fine
however if i select xp all is fine but next time i boot the laptop it never boots
just get the very first line and then it reboots
it doesnt get to the grub loader

if i reinstall suse and patch it - it does the exact same

so a few questions
1. how do i boot it
2. can i make some kind of boot loader floppy
3. any ideas of the issue

 

[xwb]

What sort of configuration do you have? The one I found works best is 4 partitions

C: Not very big but FAT32/FAT16
D: XP NTFS
E: Linux whatever
F: Linux swap 128Mb max

Both XP and Linux will modify the MBR but both can read it. They will also install something to boot themselves up. E and F will disappear into the Linux filing system once Linux is installed so you won't see them after that happens.

C can be used for transferring files between Linux and XP.

Format C first as FAT32/FAT16
Install XP on D
Install Linux on E/F (hda3/4 or something like that)

 

[stanhubble]

i have a dell latitude d600 that was dual booting xp/suse9.2 and i upgraded the suse partitions to 10.0 "live eval i think - downloaded dvd image"
it all seems to work fine... c -> ntfs d -> fat32 ~40gb total
with the rest of the 80 gb drive as linux ext3/swap partitions
using grub as the boot mgr with suse as the default windows as an option.
how are you shutting down windows? (sp1 or sp2?)

 

[terry712]

it's sp2
windows shuts down clean
replicated the issue on a pc dual booting to nt4 as well

going to vmware the pc