How to help? was Re: Serious reservations about FC2 release on 5/18

[Phil Durand]

On Mon, 2004-05-17 at 13:59 -0400, Anthony DeStefano wrote:
> Some people reported it only happens with large disks (> 120GB), but
> that's not the case here.

It must be for large disks, I have a 80GB drive, and I had no dual boot
problems with Windows XP and Fedora Core 2. As a matter of fact, I have
several systems setup currently to do this.

I'm thinking from the sounds of it, that most people have serious
misunderstandings of partitions, and how they are manipulated during
installations of operating systems etc. Not that I'm saying that FC2
doesn't cause problems, but that a workaround is probably much easier
than it seems.

On my laptop, there is a very interesting setup that I think might help
a lot of people.

This requires three operating systems (these three operating systems are
required for my machine, but its combination I think is the key!)

Drive 1. 80GB IDE Hard Drive (Holds GRUB Boot Loader)

Partition 1. MS-DOS 6.2 - FAT16, Boot Partition (Holds XP's Boot Loader)
Partition 2. Extended Partition
Partition 3. WindowsXP Pro - NTFS, Partition inside extended.
Partition 4. Fedora Core 2 - EXT3, Partition inside extended.

Now if you install Linux, it sets up GRUB with 2 entries. DOS and Linux
(which I named, WindowsXP/MS-DOS and Fedora Core 2). If you boot DOS, it
loads up partition 1, displays the choices of WindowsXP or MS-DOS. Both
these boot loaders have timers, so they can all happen quickly if you
like things to still go a certain path quickly.

I also have a AMD AthlonXP 2600+ with that 80GB drive, and it has XP and
FC2t3 working dualboot, I dont have any problems.

Phil Durand <draek at shaw.ca>