Grub not able to boot XP

Hi

Well here goes a detailed explanation.
I have a pc with to hard disks hda and hdb.
Upto 15 days back I was running (infact quadruple booting) Xp and linux
distros.
XP(/dev/hda1)
Slackware 10.2
FC3
Ubuntu (on /dev/hdb)
Kanotix
Evertything was hunky dory and I was happy. One fine day Windows XP
started giving errors. Whenever I started an application(Excel,Firefox)
a message would popup
"Windows-corrupt file C/Windows/prefetch/xxx.pf is corrupt or
unreadable run chkdsk"
After this message all applications would run smoothly. This became
very frequent and my firefox files (bookmarks,cache) would become
corrupt and I had to install and reinstall firefox.
Even Azureus started giving these message and I stopped using it.
Suspecting a problem in my /dev/hda1 I started about
reinstalling/repairing Win XP.
My first problem was that the XP CD which I had was not bootable.
So I had to run setup and go through all the steps till the repair menu
came up and this finally ended in
"Windows cannot repair the installation as C: is corrupt"
In all this effort I lost my GRUB menu. I restored it after booting
into rescue mode. Now I am able to boot into Linux but GRUB does not
boot XP
The follwoing message is displayed and GRUB goes back to the menu with
the time specified i.e. GRUB restarts.
Starting WinXP professional
Filesystem is FAT and partition type is 0xb3
root (hd0,0)
2 more lines

Starting GRUB Stage 2

After this I am back into the GRUB menu with the first option selected
and the time remaining displayed.

Also I tried this I went to the GRUB command line and tried the
following
root(hd0,0)
setup (hd0)
checking whether stage1 exists ............no
why is this message given

Questions
1. What could be the problem. Why am I not able to boot to XP
2.Can I format /dev/hda1 from Linux. All my partitions are mounted in
Linux and I can access files
from Linux.



Thanks
Ninad

Ninad Bapat wrote:
> Hi
>
> Well here goes a detailed explanation.
> I have a pc with to hard disks hda and hdb.
> Upto 15 days back I was running (infact quadruple booting) Xp and
> linux distros.
> XP(/dev/hda1)
> Slackware 10.2
> FC3
> Ubuntu (on /dev/hdb)
> Kanotix
> Evertything was hunky dory and I was happy. One fine day Windows XP
> started giving errors. Whenever I started an
> application(Excel,Firefox) a message would popup
> "Windows-corrupt file C/Windows/prefetch/xxx.pf is corrupt or
> unreadable run chkdsk"

Your Windows installation is probably *screwed*. This could be due to a full
load of nasty viruses, disk failures, or some other oddness. If the disk is
failing, you may need to replace it.

In your shoes, I'd boot from a Linux OS with NTFS drivers to make a copy of
all your data to an accessible FAT32 file system oor to an SMB server
somewhere else, then do a clean re-install of Windows.

> Questions
> 1. What could be the problem. Why am I not able to boot to XP
> 2.Can I format /dev/hda1 from Linux. All my partitions are mounted in
> Linux and I can access files
> from Linux.

You can *format* it, but that can screw up your Windows setup. I assume
you're using FAT32 so that you can see the Windows files from the Linux
side? And why not jsut re-install your Windows, with a backup made somewhere
accessible?