[TriLUG] Linux and WinXP on same drive

[Rodney Radford]

If I remember the details correctly, you want WinXP and Linux on one physical drive (in different partitions), and Win98 on a second physical drive.  If that is correct, yes, you should be able to do that with grub. The key is in using the hide and unhide commands of grub to only show the partitions you want Windows to see (to force the correct letter ordering of the drives), and makeactive (to temporarily force a specific drive to be the 'active' or boot drive), and chainloader (to chainload and execute the boot sector from the Windows partition). Here are a couple of links that should get you started. Depending on how your partitions are setup, it can be tricky, and may take a couple of tries, so be sure to backup the drives first if you can, and definitely have a recovery disk handy.

Multiboot with GRUB Mini-HOWTO:
http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Multiboot-with-GRUB.html

SDB:Booting Multiple Windows Installations from One Hard Disk
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Booting_Multiple_Windows_Installations_from_One_Hard_Disk

As pointed out earlier, if Linux is already installed on the drive you wish to share with WinXP, it will replace the MBR as part of it's load process, but you can then boot off a rescue disk and reinstall grub.

Good luck...

-----Original Message-----
>From: Joseph Mack NA3T <jmack at wm7d.net>
>Sent: Apr 6, 2006 5:27 PM
>To: Triangle Linux Users Group discussion list <trilug at trilug.org>
>Subject: Re: [TriLUG] Linux and WinXP on same drive
>
>On Thu, 6 Apr 2006, Rodney Radford wrote:
>
>>
>> Actually, with partition magic, it is possible to use 
>> their bootloader to run multiple versions of Windows at 
>> the same time, each installed on a different partition.
>
>can you do it with grub?
>
>Joe
>
>-- 
>Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
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