Comment 2 for bug 133152

This sounds very similar to my situation, and if so, the XP part of it is not the issue. It could instead be confusion between two bootable filesystems when they are too similar. That is, it sometimes picks a backup drive image if you have one connected.

I have two nearly identical IDE drives in my system. My boot drive is hda and currently holds Gutsy, while hdb is a bit-for-bit backup from some time ago, currently holding a not-quite-functional version of Dapper.

What seem to happen is the BIOS identifies hda as the first master, and boots to hda1. But when the boot scripts remount / for rw access, it usually picks hdb. Then it tries to finish booting with a mix of Gutsy kernel + Dapper file system. The GUI doesn't work right, but the shell access from a tty works well enough to verify that /dev/hdb1 is mounted as root.

It is not repeatable - if I power cycle the computer and retry, it sometimes picks /dev/hda and everything just works. Reset without a power failure always seemed to fail.

Because the GUI was so broken, I spent a lot of time trouble shooting my X and video driver before it occurred to me to check what drive was actually mounted.

My current work-around is to remove hdb from my system. So far, this has booted correctly 5 out of 5 times, including reset without power cycle.