Unable to boot Windows XP in a dual boot setup

Question

I have Windows XP installed on my desktop, and decided to install Arch onto the desktop's second hard drive (space considerations), and installed Grub2 as the bootloader onto the second hard drive. I'm not able to boot Windows XP from the Grub2 menu on boot (I can boot the other entries, and can still boot XP by switching the order of the hard drives around in BIOS).
I've used Grub2 on my laptop for over a year now, and I've never had problems using it to triple boot Ubuntu, Arch and Windows Vista.
I created a custom entry for Windows XP (from various forum posts on this site and elsewhere):
40_custom:
menuentry "Windows XP (loader)" {
insmod ntfs
insmod part_msdos
insmod chain
set root=(hd1)
drivemap -s hd0 hd1
chainloader +1
When I select the Windows XP entry, all I get is a black screen, and all I can do is reboot with ctrl+alt+del.
I went ahead and installed os-prober from the AUR:
### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/09_os-prober ###
menuentry "Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition (on /dev/sdb1)" --class windows --class os {
insmod part_msdos
insmod ntfs
set root='(hd1,msdos1)'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 50ACE008ACDFE68E
drivemap -s (hd0) ${root}
chainloader +1
### END /etc/grub.d/09_os-prober ###
But I get the same black screen when I select this entry from the grub menu. Can anyone tell me what the correct entry to boot Windows XP should be?
Last edited by Ploink (2011-10-27 08:26:33)

Answer 1

I'd honestly just recommend installing legacy grub, or better yet LILO, the people who work on GRUB/A lot of gnu software seem to think it's a great idea to just add and add and add pointless and bloated features to things that don't need it, GRUB is a perfect example of this, and so is the coreutils, 750 lines of code is used for 'cat' whereas on an operating system such as plan9 about 40 lines of code is used to do exactly the same thing.
On legacy grub it's as simple as
title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
Which would be able to let you boot into windows on /dev/sda1
Last edited by boydey1 (2011-10-31 06:04:13)