muppet

Evening, I just found this post from Google after searching around a bit to get my system working. Y'see, I'd reformatted my EXT3 and SWAP partitions (and left Windows' NTFS alone) during a recent install of FC4 over RedHat 9, and everything was fine and dandy with both oh-esses. Until I started to get clever and tried to hide the NTFS partition (via grub.conf command HIDE (hd0,0)) when FC4 booted, and the EXT3 and SWAP partitions when Windows booted. Being a bit of a twunt, I thought that the HIDE command was per-session, and didn't actually 'hide' anything permanently. You guessed it, forgot to include the UNHIDE command in the opposite OS' boot string. D'oh! I soon realised this as far as FC4 was concerned and fixed it using command line grub, but since I hadn't booted into Windows for a few days I forgot about unhiding some partition that Windows needed to see once it started up. Hence the blue screen. In summary, before you reach for any recovery disks, emergency boot disks, Windows installation CD or impact maintenance tools, try entering this at the grub command line: unhide (hd0,0) unhide (hd0,1) unhide (hd0,2) .. and so on until you run out of partitions. My Windows and FC4 are now both booting happily, and I didn't have to go anywhere near the Ghost image I made before starting the FC4 upgrade process. Which, by the way, is a practice one highly recommends. Thanks to all the other forum members for giving me the inspiration to put two and two together, and thanks to Mr. William Gates for my cold dinner. ;P Muppet.