Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 65034
wont boot windows NT
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:02 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0rc1) Gecko/20020417 Description of problem: The version of grub included with RH 7.3 won't boot windows NT 4.0 SP3 on my system. NT boot fails with bluescreen "INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE". Before upgrade to RH 7.3 my system worked fine as a triple boot setup: /dev/sda1 WinNT; /dev/sda2 Win95; /dev/sda3 RH Linux. Before upgrade system was running RH 7.0 and triple boot with Lilo was working fine. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Upgrade to RH 7.3 2. Choose grub as bootloader 3. Add other OSes to /etc/grub.conf Actual Results: Win95 and Linux boot fine, WinNT bluescreens when trying to boot Expected Results: All three OSes should boot Additional info: Research on web indicated that WinNT expects bootstrap loader to begin with a CLI instruction. Checking grub sources shows it starts with a JMP followed by a CLI. Solution: Change 1st instruction to a CLI, remove a NOP and JMP to main part of bootstrap code. Rebuild and reinstall grub. Tested on my triple boot system and a normal single boot RH 7.3 system and works.
Created attachment 57584 [details] patch to make grub boot windows NT 4.0
Created attachment 57585 [details] spec file to include my patch
Patch sent upstream to the grub mailing list for comments
This patch isn't valid because if you put the modified version of GRUB on a FAT floppy or partition, Windows no longer recognizes it as properly formatted. Since there have been no other reports of this being a problem, I'm not really able to do much more.