Felix Underhill wrote: >> >> >> >> I'm still confused on the same point: >> Some people talk about copying the boot record (the first 512 bytes >> from the linux partition) and copying it to the windows partition. >> Other people seem to be saying that linux will "sort out the booting" >> and never mention copying the boot record or editing bootlaoder >> config files. Which is right? >> Thanks, >> SW >> > I've run XP Pro and Mandrake 8.2 on the same drive with no problems. I > installed XP first by assigning it half of my drive. Then I setup 8.2 > on the other half. When I boot up the system, the bootloader (I > presume to be lilo, not grub) shows me several options. These include > the various linux types and NT. I choose NT if I want XP and it loads > up as usual. :) > > D
Urgh! An XP installation behind a linux installation can do interesting and destructive things to disk. Check the expert archives for about the last two weeks, under my name. An XP update can do nasty things to a linux install. The EULA you click agreement on with XP gives Microsoft the right to disable non-MS software on your disk. Norton Antivirus will wipe out a linux install unrecoverably if you install on FAT32 for linux (just don't do it, ext2 or ext3 or any of the journaling filesystems work better. Trend ChipAway Antivirus in the BIOS will shriek about LILO in the boot sector if you leave it enabled. This can set up a situation where you cannot force a reboot remotely because Trend is screaming waiting for a key to be pressed. (And there were a few BIOSes where I had to hand-code to turn it off because the BIOS did not offer the option--so I had to copy it out and flash it back after deleting the enabling code for Trend, an activity that did not make me a fan of (anti)virus writers. Well replacing the link with a No-op... Anyway, people seem to be having more success with XP on one disk and Mandrake on another, with the bootloader pointers in the Master Boot Record on the XP disk (which must be first or the wimpy op system called XP sulks and refuses to work). Now for my personal experience. Someone tanked 98 and his hdd and most of his Mobo (I saved the memory) and all his power supply AND his HDD by setting up for 220V and plugging in. He asked me to fix the mess--so he had his case and his old SDRAM and he could not find 98, and I could not find a 98 replacement that would work satisfactorily with PowerDVD (he had zapped his Hollywood card and lost the little cable that went from AGP to it as well). I installed XP Home edition on 10 G of his new disk with his new mobo and new CPU. It worked. On the other 10G I threw on 8.2 Download (And he has since bought himself Prosuite since he had a DVD drive which survived). So far, so good. 8.2 is running on ext2 because I saw no reason to slow it down with ext3, and the updates have not killed it yet. I set up a test install on the defaced Barbie(tm) computer I have and it worked for XP and also for 8.2, but there was an errata on that one about making the usbmouse continue to work--On 8.2. Another Person had a Dell Dimension running 98. He loaded an XP Update and put his system out of access. It refused to recognize either one of his Microsoft natural Internet Keyboard and Microsoft Optical Intellimouse. Well he now had 4G of music he had actually paid for the privilege of downloading he could not access and he sent up a flare. I added a temporary HDD, installed 8.1 on it, booted, scooped his files to that disk then used fdisk to wipe his XP install. He was now out on the order of $295 to Microsoft for their tech assistance over the phone plus an additional $48 for the phone calls (mostly waiting time), but he did manage to return XP for a refund. He dual-boots 98 and 8.2 Prosuite on his Machine today and spends almost all of his time in WindowMaker with several tens of megs of WM themes he has downloaded. Even his sound is played through linux. I set up a temporary test system using XP Pro on an ASUS A7N266-VM with a 40G hda and a 20Ghdc and a CDRW/DVD all in a rather small desktop case. XP had 15 G of hda, /boot and /iso took up a little less than 5G and the rest was a RAID0 array for /, /usr, /home, /var, /opt, and /spare, testing JFS, XFS, Reiserfs, and ext3. I never used XP much and removed it shortly after completing testing, but it never did me wrong. Now there was another test--I had a blank front-end on a 60G disk and it was paired with a 40G on an old Matsonic VIA KT133A/686B I used the XP CD for formatting the FAT32 into an NTFS partition to find the means of mounting it from 8.2. That was an Oops--my partitions had not been in disk number order and XP decided to do something about that without informaing me. Of course /etc/fstab was not changed so my next linux boot executed a swapon on my /var partition and complained that it couldn't find a valid superblock on my one of my swap partitions which it was trying to mount as /var. I escaped with luck and a few hours labor with the only losses being the logs. Figuring what had happened consumed most of that time. Now there you have it. I still have the XP CD which has never been activated and it is headed for the trash. I do note that its network setup is very very confusing unless you have XP or Win2K servers... You have to penetrate a few layers of assumptions to tell it to connect to the internet over a LAN and basically say no more than that, if you care to use linux for internet connection sharing. Civileme >
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