Installing Windows afterFedora

[Bill Davidsen]

Craig White wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-10-02 at 19:19 -0400, Bill Davidsen wrote:
>> I have managed to go for just under a decade without a Windows machine, but now 
>> I need to have such, and I'd like to add it to an existing machine with a large 
>> enough partition which was used as work area for a project since shipped. The 
>> problem is that while I've put Fedora (and Linux back to SLS and Slackware on 
>> 2.2 kernels) on Windows machines, I haven't done it with anything else after, 
>> Linux has always been "the last OS you'll ever need" for dual boot.
>>
>> I'm not worried about the grub.conf, but the boot sector could be an issue, I 
>> have seen reports that XP with patches and Win7 check the boot sector now (XP at 
>> patch level 3). other than having to rewrite the boot sector, is that going to 
>> be an issue? Any other things I should know?
> ----
> I have seen some reports that certain hardware types require the Windows
> bootloader code and if it is overwritten, say by grub, that it puts
> Windows into repair mode when booting Windows but I have never
> experienced that issue myself and I would think that you wouldn't
> either.
> 
That's the kind of thing I was worried about, I have had that issue with the 
Linux installed in the boot sector rather than the partition, but I haven't done 
Windows recently.

> You can actually use the Windows bootloader to give you a choice of
> which to boot instead of grub if you wish - not really that big of a
> deal and there are many examples found easily with Google.
> 
> But if you have a Linux rescue boot disk (i.e. the installation DVD),
> it's rather trivial to boot into rescue mode, chroot to /mnt/sysimage
> and then 'grub-install /dev/sda' to reset the mbr for grub again, but
> then you would have to create a grub entry for booting Windows - I have
> sample at bottom).
> 
Thanks, as noted I've set up the chain loader installing after Windows was in, 
but I never did it this way before. I even have examples of doing dual boot with 
LILO from back in the old days, although I don't ever expect to reuse them.

Note to others, do understand what the (hd0,1) means, that's typical for 
"Windows first" installs, but not for "Windows as afterthought" cases.

> Craig
> 
> title Windows XP
>         rootnoverify (hd0,1)
>         chainloader +1
> 
> 
> 


-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot