[TriLUG] Dual Booting

Brian A. Henning lugmail at cheetah.dynip.com
Fri Apr 23 18:23:25 EDT 2004


As it happens, I just did something similar with my primary XP machine.

It doesn't really matter whether the XP drive remains as master or gets
moved to slave; that'll be an elementary decision on your part.  It may be
helpful to leave it as primary master, so XP's drive letters aren't
potentially confused.  I'm not sure if that would be an issue at all.  In my
particular case, hda is XP's C:, hdb is XP's D:, hdc and hdd are CD devices,
and all the linux partitions are on hde (primary master of a second IDE
controller).  It works seamlessly.

Somewhere along the installation path for Linux, you'll come to the part
where you select bootloader options.  I use GRUB, so the following tips
apply to GRUB.  I suspect LILO is not vastly different.

The installer will have probably automatically created the GRUB entry for
your linux installation.  You'll need to add an entry for your Windows
installation, which is as simple as giving a label and device where the XP
boot partition is located.  You can then elect which OS you wish to boot by
default.

Ensure that your bootloader is set to be written to the MBR of the primary
master, and you're all set.

If I've oversimplified this, it's because A) It's been just long enough that
I don't remember the specifics and B) I don't want to give advice that is
necessarily distro-dependent.

I hope this is helpful!

Cheers,
~Brian

P.S.:  I'm sure you're already aware that modules are available to allow you
to mount NTFS partitions in linux, but did you know you can mount ext2/3
partitions under Windows?  There's a utility called ext2fsd (google for it)
that makes it happen.  Acts like an NT service.  It's in version 0.2.0, so
you might not want to use it for mission-critical work, but it's a neat
ability to have.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: trilug-bounces at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-bounces at trilug.org]On
> Behalf Of Dean Price
> Sent: Friday, April 23, 2004 5:41 PM
> To: trilug at trilug.org
> Subject: [TriLUG] Dual Booting
>
>
> If I have Windows XP on a single drive machine and add a larger disk as
> the master, load it with linux and move the xp drive to the slave
> position. What needs to be done to make it dual bootable.
>
> Dean Price
> deano at price4.org
> dprice153 at charter.net
> dean.price at ctg.com
>
>
>
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