Dual boot issue

["Adam Shirey" <aeshirey@xxxxxxx>]

Hey all, I've got a dual boot issue on my laptop like none other, and I
can't tell if it's a grub problem or Windows:

A few days ago, my laptop randomly stopped booting to XP Home. When I
select it from grub's menu, the screen goes black and sits there. I can
CTRL-ALT-DEL it fine, but can't get into safe mode or any other options
there. Booting from my recovery CD or from a bootable XP SP1a disc does
the same thing, except it first prompts for any key to boot, then says
Windows is checking my system configuration.

However, Gentoo boots without a problem, as does LNX-BBC and probably any
other Linux live-cd.

I poked around with grub a bit and then any time I select XP it will tell me:

    Error 13: Invalid or unsupported executable format

It also does this if I go to a grub command line and type:

   rootnoverify (hd0,0)
   makeactive
   chainloader +1

I have only one HD, which has hda1 as my former NTFS Windows drive. (I
rewrote it with cfdisk as a Linux partition and ran mke2fs on it in hopes
that it would remove grub. Wrong again.) hda5 is my shared vfat drive,
hda3 my swap, and hda4 my ReiserFS drive. No hda2.

If I had a FDD, I'd boot from a Windows boot disk and use fdisk /mbr,
reinstall Windows, then reload grub. But I don't, so I can't. I'd rather
not try and redo the entire system's partiton table (notice I said I run
Gentoo).

Any ideas out there? Going without Windows isn't a good option, either, as
my wife uses my laptop as well, and she wants it on there.


-Adam
dingostick.com