XP pro -> Kubuntu boot dance = infighting

Hi,

I'm new here, and I only signed up because this seems to be one of the most well designed and supported software's out there, and the site is another reflection of that.
I've worked on Microsoft stuff since DOS 5x, and used to own a mop and pop computer shop so I know my way around a command prompt and associated tasks. I do need to knock off some rust.. but I'm OK.
I have zero experience with Linux, and therein lies my problem.

Here is what happened:

1. I decided to give Linux a try. (good decision)
2. Since I have a death grip on XP and refuse to let it go I planned to dual boot XP + Linux Flavor.
3. After a lot of fighting with Mint, and a lot of research I landed on Ubuntu + KDE = Kubuntu (LOVE IT)
Now is where it gets tricky...
4. I had successfully used Gparted to manipulate my partitions, so did not expect what happens next...
5. I was doing a final setup of Kubuntu dual booting with XP. I needed to resize my XP partition by around 20 gigs and give that space to Linux. (there was 190 gigs free on the XP partition).
6. The Gparted operation "completed" so I exited and inserted the Kubuntu install disk.
9. As soon as Kubuntu got to the disk management screen, I knew there was trouble because the XP partition showed it's unmodified size of 220 gigs. Uhhh Ohhh. It was supposed to be 200...
10. I went back to Gparted to confirm the discrepancy and yep. Gparted was seeing 200. Kibumtu was seeing 220. Problem alert confirmed.
11. Being familiar with XP, I went to the install disk recovery console. Ran diskchk. diskpart, fixboot, fixmbr. Nothing solved anything. Now I had no bootable OS on my system.
12. I tried a few of my own home made recovery disks and none of them booted. (I made them years ago... so I'll cross that bridge when I get to it)
13. It was critical that I saved certain data from XP before I re-installed, so I made an FAT32 storage partition and did a Kubuntu install to a single partition with a 6 gig swap.
14. Using Kubuntu I was able to save everything I needed from XP (around 37 gigs) by moving it to the storage partition. (Linux rescues Windows butt from doom!)
15. Prior to XP reinstall I resized it's partition to 120 gigs and did the reinstall. Then I ran SP3 and 161 updates from Microsoft. So windows is now up and running well. All other partitions are as they were and I now have a bunch of allocated space on my drive... all good there.
16. As a product of all the above... I lost my option to boot into Linux and don't know how to reset that option but I'm going to restructure and reinstall anyway, so that problem is not urgent.
17. Since I wanted to avoid all that you see above from happening again, I decided to look for some software to back up XP to a dedicated recovery partition, and remake a recovery disk.. Thats when I came across BCD.
18. The problem is.. When I run BCD it gives me an error saying: "error opening BCD registry" "the boot configuration data store could not be opened" and that bring this scenario to this very second.
19. I did read through the stickys and did several searches in the knowledge base, but saw nothing specific to this issue. I could have missed something of course.. My question is: Is this error simply telling me that I need to "create" this reg store file?? or... Is this a result of having the non-operational dual boot set up?

Sorry this was so long, but I know from experience that history and sequence of events matter in troubleshooting so I wanted to get it all out there.
Any and all help is greatly appreciated along with any advice on best way to restructure the partitions prior to my reinstall of Kubumtu. (I plan to have a dedicated back up partition of my basic windows setup with only Firefox + some utilities installed.. around 15 gigs) (I also plan to have a large storage partition that both OS can see.. so either FAT32 or NTFS) .. Uses will be audio recording and gaming in XP... everything else in Linux.
Thanks very much! :smile:
 
EasyBCD needs a BCD as the name implies.
The BCD appeared in Vista and all subsequent versions of Windows.
It doesn't exist in XP, in which the equivalent function is performed by the text file "boot.ini"
You can't use EasyBCD to help with a multiboot unless at least one of Vista/7/8/8.1/10 is part of the mix.
boot.ini cannot be used to boot Linux.
Your only option is to let Linux take control of the boot and use grub to dual-boot XP.
 
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