How to reinstall windows xp

[John Summerfied]

Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> John Summerfied wrote:
> 
>>Howver, this topic's made me think, maybe we have it wrong.
>>
>>The standard MBR has code that looks for the first active partition and
>>boots that. A while back, I had cause to examine Darwin's source and ut
>>contains code (in Turbo Assembler) to do that.
>>
>>If we (the Linux community) used a compatible MBR, perhaps using the
>>code from Darwin or FreeDOS, and installed it in /dev/hda (or whatever)
>>if there's no existing code there, then we'd get along much better with
>>Windows.
>>
>>GRUB, LILO or WhatEver would go in the /boot partition.
>>
>>If Michael reinstalled Windows, then he could go into wherever it is in
>>Windows he makes some other partition active and reactivate his /boot
>>partition, boot Linux and add a stanza for Windows.
>>
>>
>>Thoughts?
>>
> 
> Using Windows fdisk, you can only make a primary partition on the
> first hard drive active. /boot does not need to be a primary
> partition for LILO or Grub to work when the first stage in installed
> in the MBR. For that matter, you do not need to create a /boot
> partition with a lot of installs.

If you don't have a separate /boot partition, then the /boot partition 
is the root partition.

Its true that /boot does not have to be a primary partition, but it 
almost always can be.

Even on my laptop that came with a recovery partition, a Windows 
primary, an extended and a windows secondary, there was the possibility 
to create one more primary partition.



> 
> Just to complicate matters, how would you handle the case where
> Windows is on the first hard drive, and Linux is on the second
> drive? By installing the first stage loader in the MBR, this is
> not a problem... I guess you could go into the BIOS and change
> the drive that you boot from to handle this, but I can see problems
> with a new user trying to do that. Besides, not all BIOS will handle
> doing it.

With some care:-)

Booting the second in the BIOS is certainly an option in many cases, 
with Grub/lilo having the option to boot the first.

Some distros can resize NTFS; if we could do that and filch a miniscule 
amount for a partition on the first drive, then we're home and hosed.

There may be come cases where we need to resort to the existing 
behaviour, but having problems with few systems beats having problems 
with a few:-)



-- 

Cheers
John

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