[ltp] Installed Grub to MBR, now can't boot XP (dual boot config)

[Jeffrey Taylor]

Quoting Simon Williams <systemparadox@googlemail.com>:
[snip]
> Have you or will you ever use this R&R thing? It sounds entirely 
> pointless to me. Recovery things never work properly. This just appears 
> to be taking HDD space and making things difficult.
> 
> In all honesty just get rid of it. However, before you just delete it's 
> partition and give it to something useful, I think that XP will probably 
> complain about it not being there and then we'll be in a worse state 
> than we were to start with.
> 
> [grrr] Recovery partitions are ****ing stupid. [/grrr]
> 

Recovery partitions are like all the info that dumps to the console during
boot, absolutely useless until its absolutely essential.

I've used the recovery partition four times to restore XP when XP was
trashed[1].  I've also used the diagnostics on the recovery partition to
convince IBM that the CD/DVD drive had gone bad and to ship me a new one on
warranty.

I am going the make the effort to convince IBM to send me the Recovery CDs
before my warranty runs out, though I understand the the Recovery Partition
(on T41s) respects any existing partitioning and restores only the first
partition and the Recovery CDs restore the whole hard drive.

Jeffrey


[1] Switching OSs while suspended to disk (AKA hibernation) is a bad idea that
seems reasonable until it trashes your filesystems.  I had XP become corrupted
four times and Linux become corrupted twice before I figured out what was
happening and only switched OS from a boot/reboot.  XP I restored from the
Recovery partition.  Linux I ran fschk from a recovery live CD.