Re: [Hampshire] Re installing windows XP on a dual boot pc

Roger Munford wrote:
> I have a PC (6 months old) which dual boots windows XP with Ubuntu which
> is used by the family. My son switched off the power before Windows shut
> down and it doesn't boot anymore. Ubuntu is unaffected and so I don't
> believe that any hardware has failed.
>
> My main gripe is with the so called "recovery console" which should have
> been the path to recovery. However it refused to start. This is
> apparently due to the absence of SATA drivers which can helpfully be
> fixed by putting them on to a floppy disk - if I had a disk drive.
>
> Thanks to Ubuntu, I have all the data and I was happy to re-install XP
> but when I tried that, setup just hung "looking for previous windows
> versions". To verify that these problems were linked to the Sata
> drivers, I tried an old IDE disk with a win2k partition which was found
> both by recovery console and setup within a few seconds. It makes me
> angry that a company with the resources of Microsoft do not have better
> tools and I am convinced that this is deliberate.
>
> During the struggle I came across ntsfix which unfortunately wasn't a
> substitute for chkdsk but it reset XP's log which triggered chkdsk
> when XP was rebooted. Unfortunately the screen went blank at the end so
> I don't know the results.
>
> Can anybody advise on what to do next? I installed XP on the blank SATA
> disk when it was new without a problem and do not understand why setup
> cannot do it again or at least give a sensible reason. I would prefer to
> leave Ubuntu undisturbed and if possible the existing windows data. I am
> not even confident that re formatting the whole drive would allow me to
> reinstall.
>
> Thanks
>
>
> Roger
>
>
>
>
You can reinstall XP without the SATA drivers by going into your BIOS
settings and looking for something labelled SATA Native Mode or AHCI
mode. If you have the former, set it to disabled for the install, if you
have the latter set it to IDE (they're the same things just different
names). This setting makes your SATA drive behave like an PATA drive for
the install. Once you've reinstalled the AHCI drivers for your
motherboard you can change the setting back.

James