13.04 side by side install broke Windows XP

[afdoughty]

I have an old laptop (HP Compaq nc6220) running Windows XP. I burnt an install disc for 13.04 Ubuntu (32 bit) and went through the setup to do side by side installation with choice of OS on startup.


Ubuntu boots up fine, but if I select Windows the splash screen comes up for a couple of seconds, then there is a quick glimpse of the famous Microsoft "blue screen of death" and it crashes back to the OS selection screen.


I don't have the XP installation discs so really need to fix this an recover the situation.

Any help appreciated.

Thanks

[ahallubuntu]

~

[afdoughty]

XP won't boot into safe mode or safe mode command prompt. It keeps hitting the BSOD and crashing back to the OS selection menu.

When I did the install, I chose the defaults for everything but I did adjust the partition space slider to make it more even (I recall a figure of 14.9gb and I think it's a 30gb HDD).

What else can I try?

Is there a chkdsk I can run on the windows partition from Ubuntu or from a USB?

[ahallubuntu]

You can download and burn a Windows Vista or Windows 7 disc (google for "windows 7 softpedia") and boot that to run chkdsk on an XP partition. However, you'll need to burn it to a DVD so your computer would need to have a working DVD drive. You can probably find an illegal copy of XP online, but I can't help you find that (I've never downloaded one).

You could also try a BartPE disk - never used one myself.

Can you boot Ubuntu and mount your Windows partition? If so - how full is it? If your Windows partition is completely full, maybe that's a problem.

It would also help to know the exact BSOD error you are receiving. Yes, it probably flashed off the screen quickly. In some versions of Windows you can disable "automatic restart" so the BSOD will stay on screen until you restart or power off - not sure how to tell you to do that with your current state. Sometimes I have booted in situations like that a few times and used a digital camera to snap a shot of the screen for that split second.

Without knowing the state of your hard drive, but guessing it's pretty old (30GB), it's also possible that the drive was not healthy to start with and got worse after the partition shrink (which might have moved a lot of data around). You could install GSmartControl and check the S.M.A.R.T. status - check the Attributes tab and see if any Attributes are highlighted in red. One Pending Sector error (raw value > 0) could easily be enough to cause a blue screen like that, though, again, without knowing the exact error you are getting, I am only speculating.

[Hekabe]

You can download and burn a Windows Vista or Windows 7 disc (google for "windows 7 softpedia") and boot that to run chkdsk on an XP partition. However, you'll need to burn it to a
Without knowing the state of your hard drive, but guessing it's pretty old (30GB), it's also possible that the drive was not healthy to start with and got worse after the partition shrink (which might have moved a lot of data around). You could install GSmartControl and check the S.M.A.R.T. status - check the Attributes tab and see if any Attributes are highlighted in red. One Pending Sector error (raw value > 0) could easily be enough to cause a blue screen like that, though, again, without knowing the exact error you are getting, I am only speculating.
Indeed, with a 30GB hard drive, it's quite probable that it's simply dying. However it is possible that you simply moved the Windows partition when installing Ubuntu, which would cause...issues, to say the least. Is your windows partition (most likely an ntfs partition at /dev/sda1) still at the very beginning of your drive with no space before it?

[afdoughty]

Thanks ahallubuntu and Hekabe

I found an old copy of XP for a machine I sold. I've put the CD in but don't get the "press R to repair" option. It goes straight to a setup screen (options Enter to setup XP, C to create partition, D to delete partition).

The partitions are listed as:

38155 MB on Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapti [MBR]

C: Partition1 [Unknown] 23940 MB
E: Partition2 [Unknown] 12175 MB
F: Partition3 [Unknown] 2038 MB

[afdoughty]

Just found another version of XP on disc and that one gives me the R for recovery console option (phew). I'm running that now (taking a while).

A

[afdoughty]

chkdsk /r finished it's job and I tried to boot into XP. Now I get a BSOD that stays on the screen and says:

STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error}
The Session Manager Initisalization system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc0000034 (0x00000000 0x000000000)
The system has been shut down.

Perhaps my HDD is old, but isn't it a bit of a co-incidence that, after working fine for years, it crashes immediately after Ubuntu goes in? My gut is that the HDD is fine and somewhere Ubuntu has fiddled with XP.

[afdoughty]

I used Hirens recovery CD to do a full HDD scan and their were no errors. HP Compaq no longer sell recovery media for my PC either. Looks like I just had a bad experience trying out Ubuntu.. Much as I hate Windows, I needed it for a couple of bespoke programmes.

[Mark Phelps]

I haven't actually tried this -- but you might try using Boot-Repair to see if it fixes anything: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1769482