Installed Porteus after Windows XP...now broke. [Solved]

[rgroner]

My daughter's computer was going so TERRIBLY slow, I decided Windows XP's days had finally come to an end. Since they mostly need their computer for accessing websites for school, I decided to put Porteus on there to give them something zippy and current to use.

I shrunk the Windows XP partition and installed Porteus on the 2nd partition. I then allowed Porteus to install its boot loader, and it does startup just fine upon boot. Accessing the web via the browser is much better.

I then tried the "Boot from the first hard drive" option in the hopes that Windows XP was still in there somewhere and would start. While Porteus is great for their schoolwork, their games on Steam mostly require Windows still. But no luck, Windows won't come up.

So now that I've already installed Porteus on the 2nd partition, and windows xP is still on the first partition...is it too late to come up with a dual boot option on startup? Or do I have to start from scratch with Porteus and Windows XP to do that? I couldn't find a guide via google that dealt with my "already-did-it" situation.

[francois]

Try with grubconfig. It should find your xp partition by itself. To do so you need to do it with a cd or a usb with porteus on it:
http://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=946
Once the grub bootloader works fine to find windows, modify the menu.lst according to the instructions to boot porteus.

Do not hesitate to ask more questions.

[rgroner]

Excellent! I'll try this tonight.

[Ed_P]

My daughter's computer was going so TERRIBLY slow, I decided Windows XP's days had finally come to an end.

Microsoft's support for XP ended last yr or maybe the yr before, as such I suspect your daughter's XP system is full of crap at this point.

On her hard drive you now have a menu.lst file, open it with notepad or whatever text app your version of Porteus has and add this to it after the Porteus entries.

Code: Select all

 
title Windows XP
chainloader (hd0)+1

If it doesn't work when you reboot you can try the grubconfig option francois proposed.

[rgroner]

I remember the menu.lst from my old grub days (openSUSE 11.4), but could not find it anywhere on Porteus. There is no "/boot" directory.

I tried adding what you indicated in the porteus.cfg file instead, but that did not show up as a menu option.

[Ed_P]

It's not in Porteus, it's on your C: drive's root, along with XP's NTLDR.

After you make your change post the file's contents here for others to see, pls.

[donald]

@ rgroner
try this in the porteus.cfg

LABEL xp
MENU LABEL Windows XP
KERNEL /boot/syslinux/chain.c32
APPEND hd0 1

[rgroner]

@ rgroner
try this in the porteus.cfg

LABEL xp
MENU LABEL Windows XP
KERNEL /boot/syslinux/chain.c32
APPEND hd0 1

Ok, I had a chance to try this. It has the same result as if I choose the "Boot from first hard drive" option.

It goes to a screen that says "Booting.....", but then does nothing. It just stays there.

[Ed_P]

rgroner please boot to Porteus on the harddrive and post the output of a "fdisk -l" command.

[francois]

Bis: I reiterate my proposition about grubconfig. Its really simple.

For syslinux and xp which will call for a reinstall of syslinux:
http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/ ... _and_Vista

However, there are a lot of unsolved threads about the syslinux.cfg configuration with xp on the net.

[rgroner]

I'm not ignoring you, Francois, I swear. I'm just trying these other relatively easy things before I have to step into the grub reconfig/reinstall realm. I appreciate all the help from all.

I'll post the fdisk output tonight.

[rgroner]

Output of "fdisk -l"

Code: Select all

Disk /dev/sda: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24321 cylinders, total 390721968 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x16f6c452

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1              63   268818431   134409184+   7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2   *   268818432   390721535    60951552   83  Linux

[francois]

You do it for yourself but also for the rest of the community as syslinux is the official bootloader for porteus.

It seems that donald was right. I do not understand why in your case it does not work. The best tuto on syslinux is on archlinux:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sy ... ainloading

They propose to replace the use of the disk identifier which is in your case:
0x16f6c452

From the fdisk -l output:

Code: Select all

Output of "fdisk -l"

Disk /dev/sda: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes
...
...
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier:[b] 0x16f6c452[/b]

Modifying donald's proposition this gives:
LABEL xp
MENU LABEL Windows XP
KERNEL /boot/syslinux/chain.c32
APPEND 0x16f6c452

[rgroner]

Hmm...well, I tried that last night, but it gave me a "how to properly use this" kind of text output dealing with chain.c32 and a bunch more "manpage" type output, and then dumping me at a "boot>" prompt. So it didn't like the syntax of that menu option somehow. I'll check it again when I get home to make sure I did it right and will post the porteus.cfg entry.

[Ed_P]

rgroner post the output of this command pls.

Code: Select all

ls -ghlst /mnt/sda1

And wrap the output in Code tags for easier reading.

There should be two means of booting the XP system, the one the BIOS uses, grub, and the one that Porteus uses once grub passes control to it, syslinux. Neither of which are working so we need to see what the problem is on that drive.