need help on dual booting

dark_angel

dark_angel

Member
Hi, I just set up a dual boot of sabayon linux and windows xp on my old desktop before i attempted it on my laptop which is my main. I got it set up ok and linux boots fine but i went into the xp and first time it did chkdisk then restarted and now on it just sits on the welcome screen with the cursor. Does that mean the xp is stuffed? Does that mean it would happen on the laptop also as i want to be able to use both. The laptop would be vista/sabayon linux and i don't want the vista to get stuffed up also. Thanks for any help
 
did you partion the HDD yourself before install or did you let Linux automatically adjust the partitions?

Sounds to me like you have got a corrupted Bootloader.
 
or a partition error

the fact xp did chkdsk implies that you shrank your NTFS partition, which is always risky
 
yes i did shrink the partition to free up space to install the linux on. and i do have the windows install disk but i can just wipe they desktop. My main question is would this happen if i did it on the laptop as i'd be shrinking that also.
 
What did you use to shrink the partition with?

If you use a program such as Parted Magic , then it "should" be fine,

However....

I would be inclined to do a disk image of your laptop OS beforehand so you can restore if all goes tits up ;)

(backups are always a good idea anyway)
 
basically theres an inherent risk when shrinking NTFS partitions. A good idea is to always do a thorough chkdsk and defrag (important!) before shrinking
 
ok and what process did you use?

Here's what I do:-

  1. boot from the iso disk you made and select BOOT PARTED MAGIC
  2. run GPARTED and you will see your HDD
  3. right click on the one where you want to create a partition and select resize/move
  4. enterthe size in megabytes into the free space box for the new partition and click resize/move
  5. right click by the space and click NEW and choose NTFS
  6. then click add
  7. then click apply apply and wait........
job done(well that's how I do it for dual booting xp/vista so it should be fine for linux too) ;)
 
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