I wouldn't necessarily wipe the whole HD, just the windows partition.

You could also use Xen in CentOS 5 for your Windows virtualization. I'd wait for 5.1 though which will be more refined then version 5.

I've been thinking of setting up a Xen machine of my own with a Windows HVM and a couple of Linux PVMs with their GUIs/consoles pinned to different virtual consoles. It has always been a dream to Alt-FX to the OS of my choice.

I'll need more then 1GB of RAM to do it right though.

-Ross


-----Original Message-----
From: centos-bounces@centos.org <centos-bounces@centos.org>
To: CentOS Mailing List <centos@centos.org>
Sent: Mon Nov 19 18:18:28 2007
Subject: Re: [CentOS] Dual boot box: WinXP & CentOS 5: Impossible torestoreWinXP?

On Monday, 19 November 2007,  Philip.R.Schaffner at NASA.gov wrote:
<snip>
>A good toolkit for Windows is the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows  at
>http://www.ubcd4win.com/

Phil:I found that Grisoft AVG (I use their free anti-virus program in
Windows) has a free tool:
AVG Anti-Rootkit Free
http://free.grisoft.com/doc/avg-anti-rootkit-free/lng/us/tpl/v5#details
and I downloaded that.

>It uses BartPE, discussed earlier, but adds a lot more tools, including
>rootkit and antivirus scanners.  A clean install after data recovery is
>still the best bet.

I'll look into Ultimate Boot CD for Windows, after I get  this box up
and running again. I will either get that or BartPE. Thanks!

I recovered the data from the NTFS partition this morning, so I am
ready to "learn by destroying". The consensus of opinion from Ross and
you is that I should bite the bullet and do it correctly. Wipe the HD
and do fresh installs. Time consuming it will be (especially
installing the Windows aps), but, I will have a better system and I
will learn. For several months, I've wanted to install/use the free
VMware Server, but I don't have space on the HD to do much with it
now. One of the suggestions, from Alain, was to have WinXP running
virtually, under CentOS. I am contemplating devoting about 75% of the
HD capacity to CentOS. Installing a lean WinXP in English, and dual
boot with CentOS, and then install VMware Server and install WinXP in
English, in virtualization.

The "KISS" technique (fdisk /mbr, run the anti root kit program,
reinstall GRUB and restore grub.conf) is tempting and would probably
work,  and would be much faster, but I still wouldn't have the kind of
system I will have with the more time consuming approach.

All the ideas everyone who has responded to this thread have thrown
into the basket for consideration are deeply appreciated! Lanny
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