Praveen Arimbrathodiyil blogs here

I am still feeling sleepy. She let me sleep only after midnight. I had to wake up at 6 and come home so that I’ll be in office in time.

Well, Ranga wanted me to rescue his friends system after they installed Redhat GNU/Linux on top of Windows XP and they were not able to boot into Windows 200. I thought it was another HAL.DLL missing problem. The problem comes when you have a windows OS installed on a drive other than C and you created a partition bofore that Windows drive, default suse partition do that. It is very easy to resolve you just have to increment the number in C:\boot.ini with as many new created partitions are there
go to your c:\boot.ini file (you may have to mount the partition if you are using a live CD) line

[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /fastdetect
C:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT=”Microsoft Windows Recovery Console” /cmdcons

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /fastdetect
Assume you created a swap partition on 3rd partition. the partition were your windows is moved to 5 now. So the new line looks like this

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(5)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /fastdetect

We left Electronic City at 7.30pm and we reached his home at 9. He stays with his friends Suresh and Ramesh. I got a nice welcome and had dinner there. The chicken curry was superb. Then we moved to the business. They were braver to install Redhat in the first partition so there is no configuration file for NTLDR (default boot loader of windows). So I had to first re install Windows 2000 in the C drive and back up his data files to free one partition for GNU/Linux. We were in a dilemma as to which distro to chose ( we had fedoar, redhat, suse and ubuntu ). I suggested Suse and we started installing. We partitioned the 25GB drive (Suse’s partitioner has got a minor drw back, it needs you to chose cylinders instead of the sizes, so you’ll have to make some calculations – 1 cylinder is 9MB size). It installed finely (except for some missing packages because of bad sectors in CD – gnome didn’t install). Then i stayed there and woke up in the morning and now I’m in office typing this . Now got to meet HSR Rao.

That’s all for now.

See my previous hacks with Suse and Windows XP on Rauf’s comp