Dual Boot Nightmare - Now XP won't boot either!

[Richard Querin]

I've got a problem creating a working dual boot with XPHome and Ubuntu 5.10. 
Following is a brief summary of what has happened. Any advice on what to do?

1. I had a working XPHome / Suse 9.2 dual boot machine. Grub came up upon 
bootup and let me choose. I then decided last night to replace Suse with the 
latest Ubuntu version.

2. I used Partition magic to format the ext2 and swap partitions that 
contained Suse.

3. I installed Ubuntu from the CD and it worked without problem. The grub 
installer notified me that it recognized XP installed on the NTFS partition 
and would install grub to this MBR. No problem.

4. When I rebooted, grub failed to start and it just went straight to XP. I 
rebooted the machine a few times to confirm this behaviour.

5. After looking at some threads on the net I tried manually installed grub 
by using a Live CD of Ubuntu 5.04 that I also had. I carried this out as 
explained and it kept giving me an error 17 no matter what drive I chose 
(more on my drive info later).

6. I then used XP recovery console to rewrite the MBR. Then I reinstalled 
Ubuntu 5.10 and this time tried setting the ext2 partition as bootable (I 
didn't change the bootable setting for the xp partition..) 

7. Now the machine does NOT boot to XP at all. I get the word "GRUB" and a 
flashing cursor and the machine hangs. The only way I can get into the 
machine is via the Ubuntu 5.04 live CD. But I'm really lost trying to fix it 
from there. I've tried several things (without truly knowing what I'm doing) 
and nothing I try works. 

8. I want to run Ubuntu 5.10 but I am more interested in just getting back 
to making XP bootable! Running the recovery to rewrite the MBR doesn't work. 
I've tried re-running the Ubuntu install and setting the XP partition as the 
only one that is bootable (as was displayed during the original install) but 
it doesn't work. Suse 9.2 handled all this without problem..

9. Here's my drive info. Maybe having the ext2 partition on a different 
drive than XP or having XP on a SATA drive is the problem? I'm getting 
pretty desperate now!

IDE1 slave (hdb) - 160GB
#1 primary 100 GB ntfs hdb1
#5 logical 57 GB ext2 hdb5 (ubuntu installed here)
#6 logical 2.2 GB swap swap

SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda) - 160GB
#1 primary 75.5 GB ntfs sda1 (where XP is installed - marked as bootable)
#5 logical 84.5 GB ntfs sda5


Sorry for the long-winded explanation. ANY help to get XP booting again 
would be appreciated. I need these data and apps!

RQ
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