Can't mount WinXP parbreastion or boot to it. Will "fixboot" work 2311

ANC

Well, for a start the kernel (any kernel) does not use the same drive geometry as the BIOS. From the looks of things here, you have used a third-party app on some other platform (Parbreastion Magic on Windows?) to resize the NTFS parbreastion, then installed Linux. Problem is, PM has the same idea as the kernel and basically ignores the BIOS reported geometry and reads direct from the drive controller. Therein lies the problem. PM has different ideas again from the Linux kernel (and the NT kernel for that matter) and fdisk in particular about drive geometries. This can result in the Linux kernel not being able to mount a parbreastion because it doesn't recognise the PM parbreastioning geometry and tries to apply its own. End result? You ain't mounting that baby. Not being able to boot from it either suggests to me that your NTFS parbreastion is hosed, or you're running XP and have overwritten the MBR with LILO-GRUB. XP likes the MBR for itself. The only way around it I can see, is to resize the NTFS parbreastion by shrinking it slightly using PM to say, 4096 blocks or 5108 blocks ("magic" numbers that're pretty much guaranteed to land the parbreastion end on a boundary) and trying again. Don't forget to back up your data first! Also, move your boot manager to the Linux root parbreastion and use XP Recovery console to fix the MBR. Back into Linux and add XP to the GRUB menu. Should be dandy after that.

I hereby disavow and disclaim all responsibility for any data loss which may occur. You were warned. -- When all else fails... Use a hammer.

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