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 _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

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