Dual Boot with WinXP

[Tod Merley]

On 9/17/06, Norm <norm at workingtools.ca> wrote:
> After I looked at things closer I realised that I had come up against a
> problem I inherited with the drive.  The partitions had been
> converted to dynamic disks and the only option is a full reinstall
> which for other reasons is not an acceptable solution.
> Thanks everyone for the suggestions unfortunately I have been
> Microsofted in this case.
> Norm
>
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Hi Norm!

XP and Linux - alaways a lot of hassle!

The issue you mention appears to be correctable (see "convert back to
regular partitions" in link below:

# Disk Management Snap-in
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309044/

But that is only one of the issues.  Bootloader is probably the main
issue to deal with.  When you install a Linux it most often replaces
your Master Boot Record (MBR)(the first sector (512 bytes) of the
disk).  Fedora will do so with GRUB stage one.  If you are otherwise
set up to do so you can chainload XP, but often security applications
and other machine management software may see fit to "fix" the MBR
back to an XP MBR.  Probably a good solution is to chain load Linux
through the XP boot loader.

Another option is to use an external drive and use BIOS to prefer it
when inserted.  Or a separate internal drive.  Currently I have
Solaris on a separate drive (Solaris is not particularly GRUB friendly
and also has a tendency to want it's own MBR - like XP).  The separate
drive is a SCSI drive and so BIOS is set to prefer the IDE drive which
contains Dapper, Suse(w/Xen!), FC5, and the GRUB boot screen also
contains one item (with the recovery and memtest and floppy boot
options there are currently 10 items!) which selects Solaris on the
separate disk.  And it all works (well, boot from flash is still a
problem but...).

Good Booting!

Tod