win xp cant boot after redhat 8.0 installation.:-(

[dk999]

i recently installed red hat 8.0 on my pc.
during installation i installed grub in my mbr and now my win xp and win 98 wont boot.
win 98 says that("invalid system disk&quotand xp says that my hal.dll file is corrupt and needs to be replaced.i tried to opy and paste it from my friends computer but in vain.
what can i do?pls help.i am able to mount win98,xp in linux and red hat sits on hda3,xp on hda5 and win 98 on hda1.

 

[RiezalR]

Try editing your GRUB config file. If you have made adjustments to partitions, things might have changed a little so you might have to check which partition are the OS on. As for the Win XP corrupt file, if all else fails, try to the the 'Repair' function available in XP. Similiar to re-installing Windows XP, but it doesnt take long and you dont loose your files and settings. It will only re-install system files. A good idea would be to find out what hal.dll is used for.

 

[pansophic]

Even though I haven't tried with XP, Windows wants to be on a Primary partition. If you let RedHat partition your disk, you only get 1 primary partition, everything else is a logical drive on an extended partition.

I have had some success repartitioning the drive and resetting the boundaries in the same place under Linux, but it is not certain.

Good luck!
pansophic

 

[esromneb]

well I'm trying to do the same thing as you and I had no problems. You want to get partiton magic (which only runs on windows anyway) and make xp your primary partition. Then make an extended partiton with space for win98 and space for linux. I did this before I installed, but I guess I was lucky. Then get boot magic and it should recognize all your partitons and give you a menu. Would you like to see a screen shot of my partion magic setup?
-ben

 

[smah]

I vaguely recall someone else having this problem with grub. I believe his fix was to use lilo as the boot loader. BTW, I'm using lilo to boot XP & Mandrake without problems.

 

[FROGGYJ]

I would agree with smah, the one time I used grub and tried to boot the computer the screen would look like this:

grubgrubgrubgrubgrubgrubgrubgrubgrubgrubgrubgrubgrubgrubgrub
and so on and so on down the page.

I have ever since always used Lilo and never had any troubles with it at all. If you never had much on your windows system that you really cared about then just reformat and save yourself from pulling your hair out, unless you wanna dig deep and figure it out.

Good luck

 

[oviro]

There is another one.Install first 98 then linux&after that
xp(as an upgrade to 98).it is a little bit time consuming but works with suse.&since linux must lsb compliant i do not see any problem.or use lilo as frogyj