Grub2 won't dual-boot XP

[oldfred]

If you click on the last link launchpad and the first clickable link on that page it takes you to a history of grub.

• All versions of grub2 source in Ubuntu

Do not know if there would be any issue with the newest grub. The only other time I saw someone use a newer grub was the link I showed where someone with 9.10 (1.97) installed the early version of 1.98.

[YesWeCan]

I have tried various combinations of changes to boot.ini but none have worked. I either get a blank screen with flashing cursor or I get a parity error.

I haven't had time to try the 1.98 Grub2 yet.

I may not be looking hard enough but I can't seem to find a change history for Grub2. What I mean by this is a list of code change descriptions, written in English, between the main releases. I suppose I ought to log a bug report.

[YesWeCan]

I have decided to make my life easy and re-install grub-legacy. XP boot works fine again.

I was also trying to solve a Grub2 "feature" on an Ubuntu server that has a RAID1 LVM2 whereby the HD drive letter allocations get mixed up at boot time, seemingly at random, and this breaks the RAID1 during boot causing the boot to hang waiting for the user to respond to say it is ok not to mount the RAID. This is a nuiscance and is a disaster if you are remotely administering the server like I am. I read up a lot of articles and postings about Grub2 and came across some weird issues concerning LVM and such; life is too short so I going back to grub-legacy here too until the Gnu folks finish Grub2.

For anyone wanting to revert to grub-legacy here are good instructions: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1330347

[YesWeCan]

I upgraded from 9.04 -> 9.10 -> 10.04 yesterday. Grub2 now boots XP successfully. So I assume something critical changed between Grub2 1.96 and 1.98.

Out of interest my upgrade to 9.10 was hampered for several hours due to a dmraid issue. Although I have fake raid disabled on my Gygabyte MB (I once used it years ago) the upgrade to 9.10 caused Ubuntu to think my two HDs were part of an nVidia RAID array and it failed to find the root partition. Boot failure - scary! This had me foxed for quite some time and it wasn't until I physically disconnected the XP disk (one of the alleged raid pair) that Ubuntu would boot. However, it had a go at resyncing my XP disk first and I had to spend an hour repairing my XP installation. Final solution was to uninstall dmraid completely, reinstall Grub2 from the alternative install CD. So lots of blood everywhere but it is booting ok now. Except for my luks encrypted swap partition that wouldn't mount - I have now refomatted it without encryption.

FYI I estimate I spent 8 hours upgrading Ubuntu and troubleshooting and repairing things. However, prior to this I upgraded a Ubuntu server installation and that took under 2 hours.