Getting windows to boot from grub [Resolved]

I have a netbook that I'd like to put windows on. I reserved a primary partition (sda4) for it (boot flag/ntfs), and since I have no other way to install it but through flash memory, I made a small, clean install onto disk and used dd to copy everything over to the flash drive. Normally I'm able to just copy all the data over (dd if=/dev/sdam of=/dev/sdbn), and the mbr stuff over (dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=446 count=1), and everything is good, but I can't get the windows partition to boot after I copy it over. I've tried fiddling w/ grub and the boot.ini file (different partition numbers), and copying the mbr to the beginning of sda (hosed grub) and the beginning of sda4 (hosed the windows partition), but when I try to boot windows grub hangs w/ the boot information and a flashing cursor. Any ideas as to what needs to be done to get windows to boot?
Last edited by omgwtfbyobbq (2011-03-10 01:42:44)

It wasn't a menu.lst or boot.ini issue as far as I can tell. I tried just about every partition permutation I could in both files and nothing worked. I eventually bit the bullet and deleted boot and swap so I could just install XP on the first partition and everything was fine after that.
My best guess is that the MBRs, both the one written through the USB stick version of the XP install and the versions I pulled off of other windows installs, weren't correct, and wouldn't point to the correct partition. I can't remember exactly, but odds are when I encountered this in the past I probably just dropped the XP install CD again so it would write the correct data to the MBR and reinstalled grub, but since I couldn't do that in this case I was kinda hosed. The only thing that I didn't try and could have worked was making a clean XP install on the third partition of a hard drive and using that MBR.
Last edited by omgwtfbyobbq (2011-03-11 03:14:53)

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