Alright, after I went through some effort and pain to enable myself to install 11.1 from the locally stored DVD ISO my complete joy didn’t last long.
I don’t recall the exact development last night that led to the screw-up situation - at one point I adjusted the GRUB menu (with Yast only) in terms of standard OS and time, at another point there was no booting at all (no bootcode whatsoever found). Which came first I don’t really know now. Nevertheless I managed to start the installed 11.1 system finally, creating a new bootloader which worked, too. Just that it had no XP entry. Since Yast’s bootloader segment didn’t detect the XP partition automatically I wrote an XP bootcode manually - rootnotverify (hd0,0),makeactive, chainloader +1. Well, now my XP NTFS partition is broken - “Unexpected clusters per mft record (-1)” = : - (
I guess in the progress I not only replaced the disk’s boot code, but accidentally also the XP’s partition boot code. GRUB itself is working fine, just that chosing XP just takes a circle back to the GRUB menu.
Okay, now here comes the real problem. I’m far away from home, won’t return any time soon and so I am without the XP installation CD to run fixmbr and fixboot. Of course I’ve researched on the net how to get around that and it seemed that the “Ultimate Boot CD” (UBCD) should be able to supply appropriate tools to do so. Well, I found something on there that should at least fix the master boot record, didn’t make any changes, though. What am I doing wrong? And which of the tools on there or anywhere else can do what XP’s fixboot usually does?
With one of the tools on there I was able to access the directories of that broken NTFS partition. Everything still seems in place. Since XP/NTFS is said to store a copy of the boot/first sector in the very last I copied that one with dd, with no change, though.
Since I can’t newly install XP right here, right now - don’t want to either, just hassle - I would really like to get the XP system up and running again without being to run the XP CD, especially something like fixmbr and fixboot. It wouldn’t matter if that disabled GRUB since I could install SUSE bootloader/GRUB from scratch.
Any hints?