dual booting XP and Linux

[Mike McCarty]

Craig White wrote:


>>To who ever wants to be a smart ass,

I can't tell who wrote this, or to whom it was directed.

>>First of all, I was the one who posed the original question.  Look,
>>I'm here because I assumed that there were actually people on this
>>list that could help me because in no way am I remotely a Linux guru
>>or even novice.  I just got into this just like everyone else on this
>>list who once started out very novice with Linux and Unix. 
>>
>>It's cool, I'll figure it out eventually.  
>>
>>Thanks to everyone for all your help, 
> 
> ----
> I like the idea of removing the hard drives because it is safe. Your
> Windows hard drive cannot be overwritten or damaged because it is not
> there.

I do too, and not just for this reason. Making a machine multi-boot
requires making things which were not intended to work with each
other cooperate. Getting things going separately first, and then
trying to merge working stuff is easier than putting everything
together all at once and trying to make it all work together.

OP: If you can get your machine to boot with each drive separately
first, then it will be easier to figure out what went wrong later
if you have a problem.

> If you follow those instructions and put the Windows HD back in as a
> slave drive...until you fix grub to allow you to boot Windows, you won't
> be able to boot into Windows.
>
> My inclination would be to leave the Windows drive as primary master,
> make the Linux drive primary slave. Take care to install Linux only to
> primary slave (/dev/hdb) but have grub do it's thing automatically,
> which would over right the MBR on the primary master which would give
> you a grub boot choice of Linux or Windows.

I agree. Also, if you have a floppy disc drive, it is helpful to set
up to boot GRUB off of the floppy and fiddle the configuration on the
floppy rather than the hard drive. When you get the floppy boot able
to boot both (presuming that you do) then that configuration can be
copied over to the hard drive. If it turns out that your machine doesn't
like for GRUB to boot WinXP, then you can try setting WinXP up to
boot GRUB.

If possible, it's better to let GRUB manage the boot, but as I
mentioned, I found it easier to get WinXP to boot GRUB. If you
go to the GRUB website, you'll find that their opinion about the
fit between GRUB with Linux vs. its fit with Winxx is pretty much
the same as mine.

> Craig
> 
> As for Timothy and Mike...they don't shy from their opinions but they
> aren't dumb either. It's not about you.

I don't recall writing anything which I intended to be critical of OP
in any respect. I don't like it when a newbie who is trying to perform
a fairly complex piece of system admin it treated as if his challenge
is trivial.

Getting a machine to multi-boot off of one disc has gotten much easier
but it is still not a piece of cake. MicroSoft made their OS easy to
multiboot with each other (MSDOS, OS/2, various Windows). But they
expended no effort (AFAICT) in making their OSs bootable with anything
else.

At least one doesn't have to run FDISK just to set the active partition
every time anymore.

Mike
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