Linux Mint

Dual boot Win XP Mint broken

Bug #1564576 reported by Elbarbudo on 2016-03-31

This bug affects 1 person

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	Linux Mint	New	Undecided	Unassigned

Bug Description

I have an old PC with XP.
I installed Mint Rosa and dual boot was installed.
I have an XP entry in the grub menu, but when I select it, the computer freeze.

After googling and testing, I manually installed my own entry in grub and it works.

See 15_winxp versus 30_osprober

Revision history for this message

Elbarbudo (patricearnal) wrote on 2016-03-31:

grub.cfg Edit (7.4 KiB, text/plain)

Revision history for this message

Tman (timpster93) wrote on 2016-04-11:

I now install grub only on a separate drive along with Linux. When you start up from the Linux drive it still let's you access the windows drive without putting grub on it. I think this is the best setup.

Revision history for this message

Elbarbudo (patricearnal) wrote on 2016-04-12:

That is NOT the matter :
The code in 30_osprober is much too complicated and seems to be run on each boot to end in failure....
It would be much more effective to run it once when generating grub.cfg and just keep the result.

The code in 30_osprober is shipped with the distribution and is bugged!

I wrote the code in 15_winxp using a grub manual, and it works...

Basically I think that the "chainloader" called at the end of 30_osprober is the problem.

I ran directly ntldr /ntldr directly :

### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/15_winxp ###

menuentry "Windows XP" {
insmod ntfs
search --set=root --label XP --hint hd0,msdos2
ntldr /ntldr
}
### END /etc/grub.d/15_winxp ###