F8/F9 Multiboot question

[Lyvim Xaphir]

On Mon, 2008-08-11 at 16:50 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
> On Mon, 11 Aug 2008 08:36:43 -0700
> "Daniel B. Thurman" <dant at cdkkt.com> wrote:
> 
> > I cannot
> > figure out why I cannot get the chain-loaders to work for w2kPro
> > and XP, but it works for Vista now (go figure!). 
> 
> It is entirely possible that XP and W2K will only boot if they
> believe they live on the primary disk. Could be (not sure) that
> the only way to use grub for everything is if the main grub
> partition with all the chainloader specs is on the same disk
> with XP. 

That's not true, the grub can be installed to the mbr of an sda and the
chainloader can be configured to boot xp on sdb.  I've done this in
several cases.



> The fact that vista will boot leads me to suspect
> this may be the case, vista's boot code may not be as braindamaged
> as XP and W2k. The last time I had linux and XP on the same system,
> they were both on the same disk with grub and I had no problems
> (other than the problem that I couldn't install XP at all if
> there was an ext3 partition anywhere on any sata disk, but I solved that
> by wiping all the disks clean and installing XP first :-).

When XP is installed first, it really ought to be put on the last
cylinders of the hard drive, say a primary of sda2, and set up sda1 as
an extended partition with logicals for fedora installation.  Wnen
fedora installs, it will see xp on sda2 and set up an "other" for it.

XP does not have to be on the primary drive in order to work tho.  You
could just as easily put linux on an sda and throw xp on an sdb.  The
trick is to get the ntfs partition setup and formatted first, before you
boot the xp install disk.

This is true for both XP32 and XP64 editions.

LX