I run a dual boot setup of Debian and XP. Things have been going swimmingly since last January until I rebooted from linux into XP. The boot logo appeared briefly and then the system restarted. No errors or anything. I ran a local chkdsk and it said my MFT was corrupt and wouldn't continue. I then connected a seperate hdd with another installation and ran my hdd as a slave. The new installation picked it up, ran chkdsk, fixed some errors but it was still restarting on boot.

Eventually I wiped the partition and installed XP again. I then had to restore GRUB (thanks windows) and eventually everything was more or less good again. I switched between the two once or twice with no problems until I tryed to boot into XP again a few hours ago. Same booting problem, however this time the partition is spotless as chkdsk reports).

I've spent all day put my software back on, setting up servers, etc. and am reluctant to wipe it yet again - it's apparent that I have to find the cause here as formatting isn't going to work (that much I've learned).

Things I've tried:

* Recovery console: Disabled all boot services; ran fixboot.
* Replacing registry with default repair version found in \windows\repair\.
* chkdsk a fair few times (no problems).
* Removing USB devices (worked in the past).

Things that I know won't work:

* Fixmbr. I have grub and it points to the windows partition just fine.
* Bootlog is useless, it doesn't even initiate.

Things of interest:

* I can't for the life of me get a STOP error. It just restarts without warning (even after selecting 'Disable automatic restart on error').
* When running under 'Debug Mode' it doesn't restart - but I do get a blank screen and a locked system.
* The last thing to be modified before the system dies is SYSTEM.LOG, a registry log file found in \windows\system32\config\. It doesn't contain anything useful.
* Last thing to be done on PC before rebooting into linux was install a windows update. Maybe the same thing happened before?
* Debian is on the same disk as XP and debian mounts, reads and writes just fine.

I'm totally stuck here guys. I can't format as I know it'll just happen again and could use some fresh ideas.

Cheers

Hi, just letting you know I managed to solve this last night. I made a full writeup of how I did it which you can find here.