Dual Boot Problems XP and BT4 final

[CeEe4]

Hi guys

hope you can help me here, it seems like a silly problem.

I have an Acer Aspire One aoa 150 netbook with Windows XP Sp3 installed.

I have put BT4 final on to a USB drive, loaded it up and proceeded to install it following the "Dual Boot How To Guide" from this site.

the install goes fine and after rebooting i can see the grubloader with the available boot options..

Backtrack runs perfectly from the menu.

and the option for Windows is "Microsoft Windows XP Professional"

now when i select this option it just goes to a screen displaying

Starting up ...

and it just hangs there, i have left it for 10 mins and it does not do anything..

it seems strange as i have followed the guide and it seems like an easy thing to do.. One thing i noticed, in the How To, the picture of the grubloader screen, there is (loader) after the Windows Vista Longhorn option.. Not sure if this has anything to do with it..

Hope you can help me, cus im so close to getting how i want it..

Thanks in advanced..

[ravenrose]

that ,,Windows Vista/Longhorn,, has nothing to do with the problem i think. You could even change it if you want by editing menu.lst of /grub/boot folder.Haven't installed BT4 on my HDD yet and also it's been ages since i edited my dual boot menu of Win7/Ubuntu, so i can't tell you the exact path but it could look somehow like this: /grub/boot/menu.lst obviously if you want to edit this then you have to run this from command line: nano /grub/boot/menu.lst then scroll down to where you see ,,Windows Vista Longhorn,, and change it for ,,Windows Xp Proffesional,, lets say.
see here: How to Edit the Grub Menu in Ubuntu | eHow.com (don't have to use ,,sudo,, if you are root and instead of ,,gedit,, use that ,,nano,,.)

I think the problem is that when you click on ,,Windows Vista/Longhorn,, it tells Grub where to look for windows system files to start boot Windows. Likely that path is wrong or files are corrupted, see when editing that name of Windows , i think you could see it there as well. (i mean the path, not corrupted files.)
Also i am not giving you a guaranty i am right but it could be one of the options.
Maybe a reinstall of Grub could help.

....assuming that BackTrack still uses GRUB not GRUB2 ...

[CeEe4]

Hi

i have managed to sort it out now, i just done a clean install of Windows then installed backtrack.. The MBR in Windows must have got effed up before or somthing.

Just another thing i have looked at the /grub/boot/menu.lst and how would i go about making Windows the default OS to load after the timer has counted down?

[ravenrose]

nothing difficult, everything is explained there, in menu.lst, open it exactly the same way as i explained, and read through, if you won't be able to do it, post screen of your ,,menu.lst,,