On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 12:43 am, Lord Storm wrote: > <SNIP> > > > Storm, old china plate, Windows ALWAYS needs to be installed FIRST - no > > matter what - it's a Microsoft thing - it will rewrite your partition > > tables no matter what - and if you hose up your Windows installation > > after mucking around with GNU/linux, well, you're going to have to blast > > it all out and start again. > > > > For whatever reason, the MS family of OS's refuses to be on anything - > > or rather, boot from anything except for HDA1 (or the entire HDA for > > that matter); by common practise, Windows is install first, then > > everything else after that. Can't get around it. > > <snip> > Windows 2k was installed first then mandrake then partition scrambled. > "FIXMBR" "FIXBOOT" did not work at all. I know that Windows has to be > installed first (been using mandrake since 9.0) but this is the first time > I have encountered this problem with MDK in 10. Some how it could be the > bios level F4 bios its now F6 and Mandrakesoft may be configuring stuff for > the F6 BIOS now. > > Also I do not know enough about lilo to configure it after mandrake is > installed. > > I think ill be doing the beta run with MDK 10.1 and all candidates I just > hope they anounce it on Distrowatch.
This might be of interest:- See: http://basiclinux.net/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Basiclinux/WindowsBootLoss Be sure to see the link to the Prevention and Recovery - it's a lot easier to read then the huge bug reports. :-) Loss of Windows XP boot after Linux Install Some people are finding that they can no longer boot Windows XP after installing Fedora Core 2. I found a similar bugzilla report for Mandrake 10 and reports of this on SUSE 9.1 as well. There is a combination of ingredients that causes this problem. They are: 1. The distro uses the 2.6 kernel 2. The distro installer uses parted to repartition the drive 3. The installation is done on a large hard drive 4. Windows XP is installed on that same drive What happens to cause the problem? I am not an expert on this, but my understanding of what I've read in the bug reports is that this is it in a nutshell: 1. kernel 2.6 doesn't try to give the logical geometry, and gives the physical geometry instead 2. parted (front-ends include diskdrake and disk druid) uses the physical geometry given by the kernel to generate the CHS information during the repartitioning. This CHS information gets written to the partition table 3. the BIOS sees that the partition table uses a different CHS geometry, and adapts to it 4. Windows has the previous geometry that it keeps in its boot sector. This no works with the changed CHS that the BIOS now provides. The Windows boot fails. To read the bug reports yourself, see: * Mandrake bug report opened: 2004.02.17 http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7959 * Fedora bug report opened: 2004-02-17 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=115980 For information on how to prevent or recover from this problem see "Dual Booting Issues With Fedora Core 2 and Windows: Prevention & Recovery" http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/ This guide should also help with other distros which have this problem. The basic idea for prevention here is to give the drive geometry as a parameter when booting the kernel during installation - for example: linux hda=14593,255,63 The guide explains that you can get the geometry using fdisk (Linux version) from a rescue disk. The explanation uses the Fedora Rescue CD, but there are a number of rescue disks available - normally the installation CD itself can function as a rescue disk. My thinking is that laying down the partitions before doing the install would solve the problem, but many new users would rightfully just use the installer to do the job and run right into this situation of not being able to book Windows XP afterwards. fdisk or cfdisk do not read the geometry in the same way that parted does. Another prevention for this would be to install Linux on a separate hard drive. I would recommend that you do not install GRUB or LILO to the MBR of the disk that Windows is on, because I have seen reports of this geometry still being rewritten in such a case. -- AnitaLewis - 19 Jun 2004 -- Registered Linux User:- 329524 ------------------------------- The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures. .............................Henry David Thoreau _______________________________ This email is guaranteed to be Wholly Linux Mandrake 9.2, KMail v1.5.3 and OpenOffice.org1.1.0 ________________________________________________________________________________________________ Experience what others using Mandrake Linux have experienced at:- http://twiki.mdklinuxfaq.org
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