I said:
> I'm having no luck getting GRUB to boot Win XP Pro ...
I've got it working. The magic ingredient seems to be to make sure that
WinXP is installed in a primary partition. Which, for some reason, XP's
own installer tends not to do.
Here's what I actually did:
1. Boot Red Hat 7.2 install CD, use its partition management to wipe all
existing partitions and set up the partition set that I wanted,
including a primary partition for WinXP (which I marked as type ext2 for
lack of a better idea). Abort the install after the
partitioning/formatting step.
2. Boot Windows XP install CD. It refused to reformat the partition
I'd made in step 1, so I had instead to tell it to delete and recreate
that partition as an NTFS partition. Then finish the install normally.
3. Again boot RH install CD; reformat the existing Linux partitions
(just for paranoia's sake); tell it to install GRUB in the boot
partition, not on the MBR; complete the install.
4. This left me with a working system that would autoboot into Windows,
since Windows had set the partition table to mark its own partition as
active (bootable). I used sfdisk to mark the boot partition as active
(sfdisk -A1 /dev/hda) and I had a working dual-boot system.
In hindsight I could probably have allowed the Linux install to complete
in step 1, and saved myself the time to reboot and reformat. I saw no
evidence that the Windows installer mucked with the other pre-set-up
partitions. It does, however, mark its install partition as active,
so you'd better remember to make a Linux boot floppy so you can get
back into Linux to run sfdisk.
I am not sure why GRUB can chain to WinXP's boot code when WinXP is in a
primary partition, but not when it's in a logical partition. Might be
something for the GRUB maintainers to look into.
I'm also not sure exactly what the conditions are under which WinXP's
installer will create a logical rather than primary partition for
WinXP. But preallocating all four primary partition slots, as I did
this time, seems to prevent that from happening.
regards, tom lane
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