My Dual Boot Does Not Work To WinXP From Grub Menu, Help?

[mastablasta]

Luckily I only have mostly legacy games installed on windows because it's more of a test and research legacy machine.

i moved in 2019. i still have XP on another disk, but have not boot to it for a while. i spend time now making old games work on Linux. most of them work now. some out of the box, some need a few libraries. but so far i managed to get 1 with silver rating working perfectly and one with wine garbage rating working well. i use Playonlinux for that as it has a nice GUI. also many XP games run way better on linux. i mean Far cry 2 was slow even at low resolution. but on linux i can have it run on medium and i can barely see a slow down.

what i wanted to say is that after i sucessfuly arranged a dual boot i made a small script that will boot once to windows when i double click the icon on desktop (i use Kubuntu). by default it boots to linux as that is way fatser. when i double click the icon it boots to XP, then i can play a few games or whatever and then when you reboot windows the PC boots back to linux. anyway with playonlinux (wine) i don't have a need to boot to windows. some old games have open engine implementations (Open Jedi Academy, Open Jedi Knight, Doomsday engine for doom, OpenMW for Morrowind...) and they work better then original and make games run natively on linux. i also ran Doom3, Quake4 and the original Pray on linux. so anyway, mayn games work, many games to play, not enough time.

the only game i am missing for a bit is League of Legends, but it didn't work well in latest seasons (PC only has single core and it started to struggle with it after certain update).

on the other hand i installed steam on linux and bought the half life pack (most in there run natively), installed CS:GO and Team Fortress 2, Story about my uncle, Kerbal Space Program, Crusader kinds, Company of Heroes... there are a few more native ones available but i don't have time to play so i didn't buy them. oh and we are playing Minecraft a lot with the kids.

[cliff-bjazz]

Thanks mastablasta

Its really interesting to find out that Linux can be good at running legacy Windows games. Maybe in the future I might make this machine strictly an Ubuntu one, and then explore all the possibilities you have outlined to me regarding games.
it sounds like it could be a lot to learn but that might also be fun.

I really appreciate that.
Thanks,
cliff

[cliff-bjazz]

Hi Yancek,

I just tried the fixmbr process with the windows XP Installation CD, now I cannot boot into anything at all. when I boot up I get an error message telling me that the disk cannot be read, and that I should press ctrl-alt-del to restart, it just goes around in that loop.

The fixmbr process on completion confirmed that the master boot record had been written for partition 0, but Windows XP is installed on partition 1 which I find a bit strange. Other than that I have no idea what is wrong.

Thanks,
cliff

[yancek]

Do you have Legacy/CSM boot enabled in your BIOS?
Have you tried booting your windows installation DVD and selecting the repair option and then running chkdsk on the partiiton? chkdsk with parameters will check to see if the filesystem is corrupted and stry to repair. You might need to do an online search as to how to access and run it and which parameters to use.
Do you know the exact error since the MBR is not on any partition.

[cliff-bjazz]

Hi Yancek,

Alas, I tried all the great solutions you provided, but my system just would not comply. So I used the installation CD and wiped everything with a new XP installation. It's ok though because I learned a lot through this process. I might try Ubuntu or even a different Distro later on. And who knows, with some research I might succeed next time and get a working dual boot.

Thanks again for all your great input, (and many others who helped also).

Cliff.