Tue 17 Aug 2010 11:15:59 AM UTC, original submission:
Installing Grub2 onto a system already containing Windows XP prevents XP from being able to boot.
The Grub2 menu contains a listing for Windows XP Professional and selecting it takes me to the Windows XP loader where I get a choice of booting to Windows or to Recovery. Selecting Windows returns an error of:
"NTOSKRNL.EXE is missing or corrupt."
It is not missing or corrupt and neither is my boot.ini file. All are there and appear correct.
Running fdisk returns:
Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000001
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 38305 307684881 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 38306 60194 175817728 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 60194 60802 4882432 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Disk /dev/sdb: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000972e0
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 182401 1465136001 83 Linux
XP is in sda1, Ubuntu is in sda2 and sdb1 is an external hard drive for data storage.
This error did not occur when I used Grub Legacy on the Ubuntu 9.04 and only began occurring after Grub 2 was introduced in 9.10. Running recovery on Win XP and restoring the Windows Bootloader allows booting into XP but now no options for my Linux installs.
I have repeated the error over and over, using different hardware and different copies of Windows XP, Home and Professional, different Linux distributions and allowing Grub2 to install automatically as part of an OS install or manually myself. A friend's system has been tested as well and reproduces the same error.
Grub Legacy works every time, Grub2 does not.
I'm not a hugely experienced Grub user, so if this is well known and I've done something stupid, please advise. However, I find this error with Grub2 commented on all over the place with noone seeming to know what is happening or how to fix it. All suggestions so far have failed to work.
I include a copy of my current grub.cfg. If anything further is required, please email me and I can provide.
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