Dual boot FC2T2 and WinXP?

[Michael A. Peters]

On Sat, 2004-04-03 at 23:29, Brian Bober wrote:
> On Sat, 03 Apr 2004 16:21:39 -0800 Vincent <pros-n-cons at bak.rr.com>
> > 
> > My setup came across the same problem as most here noted. FC2-t2
> > chewed up my win XP. First I tried fooling around with grub's parameters
> > snip
> >    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> > /dev/hda1   *           1       40641    20482843+   7  HPFS/NTFS
> 
> I might be able to help you...
> 
> Although I never think dual-booting is a good idea, at least it looks like you
> were smart enough to do one OS per disk. Next time you might wanna use VMWare
> instead of dual-booting like that. You can use VMWare on the second disk from
> within Windows, and it'll stop Linux from messing with the first one. You are
> probably best off, though, buying an old used system off Ebay to install Fedora
> on (and it'll probably cost about the same as VMWare). Dual booting is just a
> bad idea.

Dual booting is not "just a bad idea"
I wrote a small article that discusses how to do it safely, without
needing to buy VMWare. It does require two disks though.

http://mpeters.us/linux/dualboot_grub.php

I had the problem of unbootable WinXP in Test 1.
The solution I came up with guarantees that installing one OS will not
foobar the other, simply because the other is not visible to be foobar'd
with.

I need to dualboot because there are a few specific apps that run on
Windows XP that I need to use (Linux is my primary desktop). Stamps.com
and TurboLister and Mavis Beacon Typing Tutor and Photoshop. The gimp is
actually quite good enough for most things, but there are some
commercial photoshop filters available that don't (yet) have gimp
equivalents.

Since I'm not running a server, dual booting one box makes more sense
that using two boxes and a KVM. Especially since it gets hot where I
live and I don't have air conditioning.

Anyway - point is, it's not a "bad idea" - it just needs proper
implementation.

>  I used to dual boot Win95 and Slackware when I was a teenager. Two
> systems is just so much better. It also means you can never really run a
> web-server if you dual boot. You might wanna check out VMWare if you want only
> one system. Its very nice.

Running a web server on your desktop is a bad idea - unless it's just
for testing purposes.

I'll agree that dual booting a server is a bad idea - since servers
generally should be kept up as long as possible and only be brought all
the way down if there is a need to upgrade the kernel or update hardware
or when cleaning up after a compromise. But for that same reason running
a server on a desktop is a bad idea.

-- 
Cheap Linux CD's - http://mpeters.us/linux/