Comment 2 for bug 8288

It seems that the installation of grub or lilo during the Ubuntu installation
makes changes to the MBR regardless of what the user selects.

My problem. I have Windows XP installed on hda1. It's a 10GB partition. I
have installed Ubuntu a number of times and regardless of what I choose I loose
the ability to be able to boot into Windows XP. I have tried the following
combinations.

1. Installed lilo or grub into the MBR. Unable to boot Windows. It is unable
to find the NTLDR.
2. Installed lilo or grub into the linux partition and was planning to modify
the boot.ini (and use bootpart) to access the Linux parition. No success. I am
unable to load the NTLDR, it seems there were changes made to the MBR regardless
of what I selected during the installation.

Interesting things. Once I install Ubuntu and the MBR breaks, I am unable to
reinstall any Windows operating system. Even with a fresh install and after
formating the drives during the installation it is unable to boot. If I use the
recovery console in Windows 2000/XP to "fixboot" and "fixmbr" it still does not
correct it.

I've since created a Windows 98 boot disk with fdisk. Doing a plain "fdisk
/mbr" still does not fix the MBR, I have to manaully delete the non-dos
partitions in fdisk, save changes, reboot, then "fdisk /mbr", reboot, and then
reinstall for it to boot Windows normally.

axe9 on #ubuntu is having similar problems. I don't have access to my
configurations at the moment, but I'm going to upload them tonight. I've asked
axe9 to append notes to this bug.