Help cant get XP to boot after Freespire install

[frankienyc123]

Ok I am a total nebie to Linux and want to try it out. I didnt wanna mess arround with partitions on my XP drive so i used an old 20gig drive that i wasnt using and treid to install Freespire on it. It got through the instaltion and then it tells u to remove the cd and restart i did that and im getting a Grub 1.5 error and it says error 17. So i figured the drive must be bad or something i havet used it in years. So I try to boot back into XP which is on a totally differant drive and im still getting the Grub Hard disk error and no matter what do i cant get Xp to boot. Ive even removed the hard drive that I installed Freespire on and still i cannot get XP to boot? Please help me This is driving me crazy and i dont want to have to reinstall XP.
thanks
Frank

 

[bmouring]

Freespire (a bad choice for dualbooting since it just does stuff without asking) has clobbered the Windows MBR, boot the Windows install bootcd, go into the recovery console, and use the "fixmbr" command. Here is a good overview with links to other relevant topics if needed (like how to enter the recovery console).

BTW, a Grub error 17 means Grub was setup to try to boot an invalid partition on the disk, basically Linspire screwed up. I would suggest if you want to try dualbooting again, give SuSE, Fedora, or the ever-popular Ubuntu a try instead. Any of these are much better in terms of installation and are extremely easy to use.