Uh-oh... booting problem

[Brightguy]

I'm thinking about trying out Linux, so I wanted a dual-boot setup. I create a new partition and everything goes fine... just to test it out I try Win98 on it, and it works. So with fdisk I set the active partition back to the partition with WinXP, but now it wont finish booting. I get the following error message: autochk program not found - skipping AUTOCHECK. And then it restarts and this keeps repeating. I tried it with Safe Mode and other options, but it still doesn't work. I wish I at least had fdisk on a DOS boot disk or something, but my computer doesn't even have a floppy drive. I knew that was a bad idea.

So, is there anything I can do? Right now I'm running on Knoppix...

[Brightguy]

It looks like this page explains what went wrong... it's trying to boot XP from a partition that isn't active. Although I don't understand why it would be doing this...

Apparently the solution is to change the NTFS partition type from 17 (hidden NTFS) to 07 (not hidden). So right now I need some kind of a CD boot disk so I can run fdisk. Does anyone know if you can use the WinXP setup CD as a boot disc?

Or, is there some way to change parition types under Knoppix? (Also, I'm wondering if there is any way to browse files on your hard drive with Knoppix.)

[wtd]

Not sure if this'll help, but when you're building a dual-boot system, always install Windows first.

[Brightguy]

Good news! Finally, Windows is running again, exactly like before. I couldn't get any bootable CDs to work, so I had to get a floppy drive. After that, it was just a matter of using a normal boot disk to get to a command prompt, and then I used ptedit to change the partition type from 17 to 07. Those values are in hex, so it was just one bit in the partition table that locked me out of Windows for the past week...

So, now I'm ready to give Linux a try (maybe after my memory of this starts to fade a little...) Any particular reason you should always install Windows first, wtd? Do installers check for Windows and set up things to work automatically? Unfortunately for Linux, the possibility for events like this will cause some people to never even consider it...

[Hikaru79]

Brightguy, you should always install Windows first because Windows will clear the Master Boot Record on install, whereas Linux won't. Basically, if you put Windows on top of Linux, it'll erase all traces of Linux from your computer's boot record, and it dies. Linux is nicer -- it can share. So let it be second.

[Leftover]

wtd wrote:

Not sure if this'll help, but when you're building a dual-boot system, always install Windows first.

You can install Windows after, it just has to be on a primary partition (I.E. leave master partition 1 open, and put linux on all extended after that) and once the installation is complete, you must redo the setup of Grub (or whatever boot loader you choose) to take over settings that Windows wrote to the MBR.