I have been running windows xp for about a year now and I decided I wanted to play around with Red Hat 7.3 I replaced my hard drive containing xp with an old one I had laying around and installed RedHat. I then decided I wanted to try and set up a dual boot using the Linux Grub. I reinstalled my XP hard drive as the primary slave. I messed around trying to get XP to boot from grub, but I was unsuccessful. I then removed the RedHat drive and placed my hard drive as the primary master again. Now when I try and boot I get the blue screen moments after I see the XP boot splash screen. I tried booting with the XP CD but I received the blue screen immediately after it says loading windows. I can't get to the repair console. I removed the XP hard drive and replaced it with another hard drive and I can get to the repair/setup screen fine (no blue screen). The blue screen states that there was a problem with a plug-and-play driver. My best guess is that in the process of doing everything I somehow messed up the boot record. Does anyone have any ideas? I'm using NTFS. I'm a little afraid that if I installed XP on another hard drive so that I could access my partition to retrieve data that I would still receive the blue screen on boot when the XP hard drive is reinstalled in my system. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

Hmm... Just a hunch, but try to make the XP drive the primary and the Linux drive as the secondary. The NT boot loader stores which partition to boot ordered by which ide chain it's on. (Sorry, I can't provide more detailed information, I'm working on five year old memories here. :-) Anyway, assuming that works, you can boot from a rescue disk back into Linux and install grub onto the boot sector on the XP drive. If that doesn't work, seek help from the forum again, but be sure to include the exact text of the blue screen error. It could easily be something entirely unrelated. (In either case, you'll want to ask your question again in a Windows forum.) Good luck!

I tried putting my XP hard drive back in as the only drive (primary master) and that didn't affect anything. It seems no matter where I place the hard drive in the chain I get the blue screen. I guess I can try resinstalling linux and placing grub on the xp drive, but have a feeling after grub tries to load the XP kernel that I'll get the blue screen again.

You don't need to reinstall Linux to fix a Windows problem.... It also seems I misread a part of your post. Sorry. :-( Anyway, this is a Windows problem -- why don't you try the XP forum? You'll have to find out what driver is causing the trouble and maybe try disabling or removing the device. Something else has changed here, I think. Adding Linux on another drive doesn't change anything as far as Windows is concerned. If you have an actual XP disk (and not one of those crummy restore disk disasters) you can reinstall Windows.

i encountered problems similar to yours. i had xp on primary master and linux on slave. when i decided to remove linux to switch to a different distro i didn't realize it would leave lilo on the mbr, and it kept trying to boot with lilo and i couldn't get on xp. reinstalling linux and lilo back on the mbr solved the problem. you can use fdisk to make a new master boot record.