Dual Boot Caused Blue Screen On Win XP

Hey all,

First off I hate to say this: I do not want anyone saying "just reformat" or "Who cares, (linux or windows) is better" I want true answers please. I really need some help because I need this computer for school Monday.

I've been wanting to run Linux for awhile and decided to run Ubuntu because it looks pretty darn slick . So, I played around and loaded in the Ubuntu 6.10 CD and clicked install. I set my timezone, language, keyboard and etc. When it got to partitioning, I chose to resize my NTFS partition. Took 30gib of free space and made a new ext3 partition. It worked for a minute and then began to install Ubuntu. It was all finished, I restarted and GRUB work... I was able to choose operating systems. So I did. I chose Windows XP Professional and when I got to the loading screen, it would work for about 3 seconds and then blue screen of death and then restart.

Does anyone know of a way to fix this? I can tell you any information about my computer you want. I just need to be able to get back into Windows by Monday so i can do my schoolwork. I also, if possible, would like to do this without reformatting my HDD or using the weird Microsoft recovery tool (The one that reverts everything back to the start with your files in the middle).

A lot of people say use the fixmbr command, but I raid that it messed some people's hard drives up under these conditions.

Thank you soooo much for your time!
Christopher.

 

Did you defrag your hard drive before resizing the partition? If not, you very likely over wrote required booting files. See this tutorial:

http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2006/05/08/dual-boot-laptop.html

I won't claim to know how to help you fix it, as I haven't resized a partition with Linux tools before...I always set my partitions & installed from scratch. I hope you backed up your important files before attempting a dual boot configuration with Linux for the first time...it may come to reloading in the end. Hopefully someone else can give further guidance.

 

Thank you for your reply!

Yes, thankfully I did backup and went into this knowing something could happen but hoping it wouldn't . I defragged, scan disked and disk clean uo'd the whole drive before starting

Anyway, thanks again. I'll post back my findings .

 

since this is your first time with Linux, perhaps a LiveCD would be the best until you get some Linux legs. Installing this will not change your current install but does run slow as it loads everything from CD. At least you had everything backed up. BTW, it sounds like you have a pre-installed XP, correct? I'm no expert on *nix either.

 

Thanks for the help guys .

I decided just to reformat. I deleted all my partitions, made a new one and installed Windows XP Pro SP2 on it and then went and tried to dual boot Ubuntu the same was and it crashed again... So I pretty much said "screw this!" and will be pleased with Windows for awhile.

Thanks again!