Running Windows XP in Xen from its own partition
Some months ago I made some experiments with Xen and I succeeded to install and run Windows XP as a guest using Xen 3.0. In that case Windows was located in a single file and was installed through Xen. My purpose now is to make Xen running an already installed Windows from its own partition. Just to be more specific, this is my machine configuration:
- Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06 is located on a SATA disk, set as first boot disk
- Windows XP is located on a EIDE disk, set as second boot disk
- Dual boot is made by grub
Posted by: Z24 | Mon, Dec 03 2007 |
Category: /linux |
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Tagged as: grub, linux, ubuntu, virtualization, windows, xen, xp
Recover "Logical sector size is 0" with dd
A few hours ago while I was using my pc suddenly Windows froze completely (mouse was stuck and Ctrl+Alt+Del did nothing). It's not astonishing but I was quite surprised because such a freeze never happened since I began using Windows XP on my new pc.
The problem appeared at the reboot: grub, the bootloader on /dev/sda, showed this error message:
At reboot I started Windows XP Recovery Console from the Windows CD and tried
CHKDSK.EXE, and this was the outcome:I booted again linux to launch
fsck and see it fail:Then I found the solution in ubuntu forum:
root@am2:/home/z24# dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/defmedia/bkup_fat32_hda1.img bs=512 count=2048000 conv=noerror,sync 2048000+0 records in 2048000+0 records out 1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 43.61 seconds, 24.0 MB/s root@am2:/home/z24# dd if=/defmedia/bkup_fat32_hda1.img of=/home/z24/sector6.bin bs=512 count=1 skip=6 conv=noerror,sync 1+0 records in 1+0 records out 512 bytes (512 B) copied, 0.011544 seconds, 44.4 kB/s root@am2:/home/z24# dd if=/home/z24/sector6.bin of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1 conv=noerror,sync,notrunc 1+0 records in 1+0 records out 512 bytes (512 B) copied, 0.030644 seconds, 16.7 kB/sExplanation:
- the first dd makes a backup of the first gigabyte of the Windows partition: I copied 1 GB only because I didn't have enough space on a ext2fs to backup all the 28 GB of /dev/hda1.
- the second dd extracts the sixth sector to a temporary file: as reported by Microsoft KB247575, "The backup FAT32 boot sector is located at sector 6 of the logical drive".
- the third
ddcopies the extracted sector 6 to sector 0 of /dev/hda1.
dd was also checked with losetup and mount. Thanks a lot to the ubuntuforums user Onlymee for his post!
Update 13.09.2008
The same problem happened again today and gave me the opportunity to complete the series of error messages :)The first, at boot time, was the same: Mounting the partition (
mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt):
dmesg | grep sda1
But fdisk -l /dev/sda shows the partition table.fsck.vfat /dev/sda1 (executed from Ubuntu 8.04 alternate cd)
The solution was exactly the same: copy the sixth sector back to the first. And voilà, it booted.
Posted by: z24 | Sun, Jun 24 2007 |
Category: /hardware |
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Tagged as: error, grub, hardware, linux, system recover
Install and boot Windows on a second hard disk
I have a SATA disk and a EIDE disk, I installed Linux on the SATA disk and now I want to install Windows on the EIDE disk.
Because Windows must be installed on the disk that boot first, I entered BIOS and changed the boot order as this:
cdrom
EIDE disk
SATA disk
Then I installed Windows on the EIDE disk.
I want to configure dual boot this way:
- default choice: Linux (booting from SATA disk)
- second choice: Windows (booting from EIDE disk)
/boot/grub/menu.list (on Ubuntu or Debian; if grub is not installed try apt-get install grub):
title WinXP map (hd0,0) (hd1,0) map (hd1,0) (hd0,0) rootnoverify (hd1,0) chainloader +1That means Windows believes the EIDE disk is the first and SATA is the second, so it's happy and if I reboot and choose WinXP from grub menu it starts.
Posted by: Z24 | Wed, Aug 30 2006 |
Category: /windows |
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Tagged as: grub, linux, windows
