Re: Mounting XP NTFS HD...
When I was repairing the GRUB, I set
sda1 as
/windows. the bootloader says it is on
(hd0,0)
Hello LatinHacker,
I'm sorry to read of your problems with Windows XP and I'm sorry I'm too late to be of any help.
It appears as if you have installed GRUB to the boot sector of your Windows partition, which is not a good thing to do.
Everything would have been okay if you had installed to MBR in your first hard disk instead.
Now, I suspect, that if the boot flag is on
/dev/sda1, even if from a Live CD I restore the Linux system, I would have to turned from this Live CD the boot flag, back to
/dev/sda5 and that would make everything alright. Since GRUB is already configured to start XP from
(hd0,0). Am I right?
GRUB doesn't need the boot flag and neither does Linux, the boot flag, if anywhere, should be allowed to remain on your Windows partition, but the position of the boot flag isn't the main problem here at all.
Let me explain a few terms.
The MBR of your first hard disk, (where you should install GRUB, (or rather, code pointing to GRUB), is in the first sector of every hard disk, and in addition GRUB uses some of the sectors after that in the first track of the hard disk, which is normally empty.
Your MBR is designated as /dev/sda in Linux and (hd0) by GRUB.
Your Windows boot sector is the first sector of your Windows partition, commonly located in sector number 63 if you have Windows XP or earlier. Your Windows boot sector needs to contains pointers to the Windows boot loader so you can boot Windows.
Your Windows boot sector is designated as /dev/sda1 by Linux if Windows is in partition number1, which is usually the case.
This is called (hd0,0) by GRUB, and you should never install GRUB to your Windows boot sector, as you found out.
Ways you could have repaired your Windows installation include,
, or for Windows XP or later with NTFS,
... to name a few.
The reason why mistakes like this happen is because there are many so called 'experts' who continue to confuse the terms 'MBR' and 'boot sector' interchangeably, and to make matters even worse, some people refer to a mythical thing they call 'the Windows MBR'.
People new to Linux read these misnomers and naturally they are confused and misled.
To avoid repeating the same mistake in the future you just need to learn the difference between a MBR (the first sector of a hard disk), and a boot sector, (the first sector of a Windows partition), and how Linux and GRUB partition numberings work.
Ubuntu user since 2004 (Warty Warthog)
Bookmarks