Until last night I had an i386 triple-boot system with Win98, WinXP, and Mandrake. LILO in the MBR would boot either Linux or the NT boot loader (which LILO labeled "Windows"), which lived in the first partition I believe. The NT boot loader would then boot either Win98, in the FAT32 first partition (C:), or WinXP, in the NTFS second partition (D:).
Last night I installed Debian sarge Test Candidate 1 net installer. Everything seemed to go fine. I deleted the Mandrake partitions and allowed the installer to automatically create the Debian partitions in the newly freed space. The GRUB install said I had one other OS, "Windows NT/2000/XP", which I assume meant the NT boot loader in the first partition. When the system rebooted I did not immediately boot Debian to continue the install. Instead, I asked GRUB to boot Windows, which correctly booted the NT boot loader. When I asked the NT boot loader to boot WinXP, however, XP errored out with a message saying that <Windows root>\system32\hal.dll was missing or corrupt. (Oddly, Win98 still boots fine from the NT boot loader.) I find it hard to believe that the Debian installer really did trash my system32\hal.dll file. In fact, I used the XP install disk's "recovery console" (i.e. DOS) to look for the file, and it's still there. The XP partition (D:, NTFS) as a whole looks just fine. Another possibility is that the NT boot loader was damaged and it's now looking in the wrong place for XP. But why does it still boot Win98, then? Very odd. And very annoying, because the only way I know to fix it is to reinstall XP, after first copying everything I care about from the XP partition to the Win98 partition using DOS. I suspect that all I really need to do is repair the NT boot loader, but I have no idea how. Further, my efforts at repairing XP have somehow removed GRUB, so the system now boots straight to the NT boot loader, so even if I fix XP, I'll need to reinstall Debian, which will presumably nuke XP again! Any help very much appreciated. Franz Amador [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
