After messing with the hard disk partitions, Windows XP installations in logical partitions failed to bootstrap directly. However, I finally managed to boot Windows XP on a logical partition by chainloading from another XP on a primary partition. This required me to edit the file BOOT.INI on the primary XP partition.
I suppose the boot sector of the logical partition is broken. I booted Linux and extracted the boot sector from the primary partition containing Windows XP.
dd if=/dev/sda2 of=xpboot.bin bs=512 count=1
I experimented with this boot sector and GRUB. At boot time, I typed the following GRUB command.
chainloader (hd0,5)/xpboot.bin
boot
This allowed me to boot Windows XP. However, the XP boot sector apparently reads BOOT.INI from the primary partition. I will analyze the boot sector file with an Hexadecimal editor. By studying the NTFS boot sector, I will be able to solve Windows XP boot problems.
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