*****  AUTOCHK boot problem in MS-XP after installing Linux   *****
*****                 Kees Lemmens, Oct. 2006                 *****

QUESTION :
==========

After shrinking the MS-XP partition and installing Linux the Linux boot
works fine but MS-XP crashes with some awkward and meaningless message :

    AUTOCHK program not found. skipping autocheck...

Then MS-XP just starts to reboot completely and repeats the whole
procedure.

Checking the NTFS filesystem (from a Linux rescuedisk) reveals that
AUTOCHK.EXE is there at least twice and that the filesystem is fine, so the
message must be bogus. 

What goes wrong and how can I fix it ?

ANSWER :
========

It turned out that the partition type of the MS-XP partition was set to
Linux (83) by accident ! Of course it should be HPFS/NTFS (7).

linux:~ 101 # fdisk -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
   /dev/hda1   *           1         974     7823623+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda2             975        1948     7823655   83  Linux
   /dev/hda3            1949       14450   100422315   83  Linux
   /dev/hda4           14451       14593     1148647+  82  Linux swap

After fixing this with fdisk /dev/hda MS-XP runs fine again (at least as far
as this is possible with XP :-) !! Piece of cake and only took about 2
minutes to fix, notwithstanding the ramble people make about this problem on
the internet :-)

linux:~ 101 # fdisk /dev/hda

Command (m for help): t
Partition number (1-4): 1
Hex code (type L to list codes): 7
Changed system type of partition 1 to 7 (HPFS/NTFS)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/hda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
   /dev/hda1   *           1         974     7823623+   7  HPFS/NTFS
   /dev/hda2             975        1948     7823655   83  Linux
   /dev/hda3            1949       14450   100422315   83  Linux
   /dev/hda4           14451       14593     1148647+  82  Linux swap
   
Another problem may be the bootflag of the partition : a MSW partition must
always be set to "active" , even while Linux completely ignores this nice
piece of non-information :<)

KL