dual booting XP and Linux

[Josh Coffman]

--- Mike McCarty <Mike.McCarty at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> Stanton Finley wrote:
> > There is a recovery partition on many Gateway
> machines, including my
> > GT5034 Dual Athlon. Writing grub to the MBR in a
> dual boot scenario
> > causes this machine to automatically go into
> recovery mode, restoring
> > Windows and overwriting the MBR which removes
> grub. Thus I am left with
> > an unbootable Fedora partition. Even when I wiped
> the whole disk and
> > restored the OEM operating system (Windows XP
> Media Center Edition) with
> > the included Gateway CD and eliminated the restore
> partition the dual
> > boot still crashes the machine. (This occurred
> with the x86_64, I have
> > not tried it with i386 Fedora.) I'm still trying
> to figure out how to
> > get dual boot to work on this machine with two
> partitions on the drive.
> 
> I have that same situation with my Presario. The way
> I got it to
> work (detractors and non-believers that Fedora
> install doesn't
> always "just work") was to let WinXP manage the
> boot. The WinXP
> boot manager comes up and presents me with a menu,
> including
> "Windows XP", "Safe Mode", "Recovery Mode", and
> "Linux", the
> last of which I added and which really just loads
> GRUB, which then
> asks me which kernel I want to boot.
> 
> If you need more information about how I got this to
> work, shoot
> me an e-mail. Since the tone around here seems to be
> that
> this is all in our imaginations, I wouldn't want to
> burden anyone
> with facts about non-existent OT situations. We'll
> see if we
> can't get your machine up.
> 
> Mike
> -- 
> 

So I've (tried) to follow this thread but I'm not
getting it.... I personally had no problems setting up
a dual boot with WinXp and Linux on a single drive
laptop.

I'm not an expert, but I'll tell you what I did that
worked. I bought my hp laptop and ran just windows,
but then decided I wanted to try linux again. I
re-installed windows (again) using only the first 20
gig of the drive for windows. Then I used a linux
install to create a partition to share between win and
lin; and installed linux on the rest of the drive
(/swap and / partitions originally) Grub is my boot
loader of choice.

In fact, I've installed several distros on this laptop
and left the WinXp install alone. I'm currently
running FC5 and most everything works great.

If you having problems, I'd suggest starting over and
installing windows first. Then install Fedora and use
Grub; it had no problem seeing and booting WinXP (for
me anyway).

╔══╗
║ j≈ 
╚══╝



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