adamgdwn

Hey everyone! I had windows xp installed on my secondary hard drive, and then I installed Mandrake 10.1 on the primary hdd. After playing around with the Mandrake for a while (I am impressed by the way), I tried to get into xp from the boot loader Grub. I get a message saying NTLDR is missing. I now know that by loading Mandrake onto the primary, it formatted it and deleted the startup files. But, I thought that Grub was supposed to be o.k. with that and would send me to the xp drive just fine. I have a start up disk with NTLDR and Ntdetect.com on it, so I think I just need find where to put them so when Grub send the system looking, it will find them. I would really appreciate any help you can give me. Later: Adam

Whoo hoo! Fixed it! Thanks for the help, but it turned out to be a fairly simple fix. I needed a MSDOS boot disk with NTDETECT.COM and NTLDR on them. After I realized that it was looking on the right hdd, just in the wrong directory (you were right on the mark when you prescribed a virtual flip Danleff, Grub had already done that for me), I copied these two files directly to the C: from the dos window. It is important not to allow it to go to c:\windows or it will never get a chance to read them. If you start up with the windows install disk, and go to the recovery console, it automatically sends copied files into the windows directory. So now I have Mandrake fully occupying the primary hdd and xp completely confined to the secondary hdd. 8) I get a boot.ini error, but it does not affect the boot up and I can tweak that out later. Thanks for the time. I tend to do thingd, then break it, then learn how, then fix. A bit of a challenge sometimes, but it solidifies the learning ( I belive they call it an experiential learner). Thanks again for the help, I'll keep watching and maybe pass on any other things I might find. Later: Adamgdwn

Sorry, it Danleff. Missed an f. opps.

Hey Danlef! I did not change the master slave settings. The secondary hdd has always had the xp home on it. When I did it's set up, I knew I was getting Mandrake in the mail so I told it to go on the secondary hdd.And no, I did not install Grub, it was already installed with the Mandrake install. It wrote the MBR for me. I changed the hdd order in the bios, and it did not like that at all. I think xp must have wrote the MBR to the primary, and Mandrake wiped that out. Knowing now that this is the way it wants to be, I could fixboot, but I risk damaging the Mandrake intal, or I guess I could flip the boot sequence and try fixboot and see if it writes a set of boot files what is currently the xp drive. But I was under the understanding that Grub was an extremely useful boot loader, and I would like to be able to use it.