Thursday, September 17, 2009

Using GRUB To Boot Windows XP with a Floppy Image

I had trouble booting Windows XP installed in a logical partition. I guess the boot sector of the logical partition was damaged. I had to boot this installation of Windows XP by chainloading from another Windows XP on a primary partition. But without another Windows XP partition, I can boot Windows XP from a floppy diskette although floppy diskettes are not in much use nowadays.



I created a Windows XP boot floppy by following instruciton on this article on the Microsoft site. Then, I booted Linux and made an image file of the boot floppy.


dd if=/dev/fd0 of=ntboot.bin bs=512

Save the image file somewhere in your hard drive. Then, when you start the computer, use the following GRUB commands to boot Windows XP.


kernel (hd0,6)/boot/grub/memdisk bigraw
initrd (hd0,6)/boot/grub/ntboot.bin

memdisk is a part of the syslinux package.


Here's my XP boot image to be used with GRUB or syslinux: ntboot.bin. Before actually using it, make sure to edit BOOT.INI in it.

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