Recipe 2.10. Troubleshooting Multiboot Problems

Problem

You are having problems with more than one operating system installed on your computer, and you need to know where to start looking to fix it.

Solution

If you receive the following error:

Windows XP could not start because the following files were missing or corrupted: WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM NTLDR MISSING You can try to repair this file by starting the Windows Setup program from  original floppies or boot from CD-ROM. Select 'r' at first screen to repair

this probably happened because you installed Windows NT after Windows XP, or because you reinstalled Windows NT. The easiest fix is to start the Recovery Console, as described in Recipe 2.7, and at the prompt, type fixboot.

If your dual-boot with Windows NT isn't working, check out the following suggestions:

• Make sure your hard drive is formatted with FAT16 or NTFS, not FAT32.

• Upgrade your NT installation, if you can access it, to at least Service Pack 5 and preferably Service Pack 6a.

If you get the following message in one of your installations:

iexplore caused an Invalid Page Fault in module kernel32.dll

then you need to reinstall each of your operating systems on a separate partition, if not a separate hard drive altogether. This is a confirmed error in the interactions between multiple operating systems on the same disk. Multiple installations of Windows XP, however, do not see this error.

If you don't see a boot menu when starting your computer, you probably installed another operating system after Windows XP. Reinstall Windows XP to correct the error. Windows XP must always be the last OS installed.

If you can't get both Windows 95 and Windows 98 installations working, quit trying. These operating systems are so closely related that they use the same boot file, so using both operating systems on the same computer isn't possible.

Discussion

If you don't have the Recovery Console installed, and you need to replace the boot files as described in the Solution section, then boot with another operating system and copy NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM from the I386 folder of the Windows XP distribution CD to the root of your first hard drive. If you're using MS-DOS to perform this copy and restore, then you'll probably need to change the attributes on the files using the following DOS commands:

> attrib ntdetect.com -r -s -h > attrib ntldr -r -s -h

See Also

Recipe 2.7 for troubleshooting installation problems, and MS KB 315233, "Windows XP Does Not Start on a Computer that is Configured for Dual Booting"