dual booting XP and Linux

[Timothy Murphy]

Mike McCarty wrote:

>> 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.

In my opinion your advice is completely misconceived.

Firstly, I imagine 95% of people already have Windows on their machines,
and are now installing Linux.

Assuming they are installing Fedora,
I would say that if they simply follow the instructions on the disk,
and install the boot-loader as recommended,
that will work 95% of the time.

You are inventing difficulties which simply do not arise
in the vast majority of cases.

It's actually quite a bad idea to change disks around during installation,
as grub has a fixed idea of which disk is which
(as described in /boot/grub/device.map).


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
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s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland