dual booting winxp, rh linux7.2

[neos]

hello,
i need to know how to dual boot winxp pro, and redhat linux 7.2. Can I use GRUB to boot them all because I am writing my own operating system, and havnt got to the bootstrap yet. Which do I install first? GRUB, xp, linux? Ive heard the winnt bootloader is very fussy about other operating systems, especially linux. What do i do first? shaun

 

[darken9999]

I haven't tried XP yet, but I dual-boot win2k. First, if your bios is a little older, watch out for the 1024 cylinder limit (fit your /boot partition in the first 50MB of the disk). If your bios has the 1024 limit, linux won't boot without the small partition. If that doesn't make any sense, let me know.
Install XP first. Make sure you leave plenty of room for Linux and a swap partition.
Once you're done installing XP, run the linux install. Use disk druid to manually set up your partitions. Leave your XP parition alone. Make one linux partition and one linux swap partition (i generally make the swap disk one MB more than the amount of RAM I have). Give GRUB control of the MBR (Master Boot Record).
That's it. GRUB will handle the boot process fine. Make sure you create a linux boot disk, just in case. RH7.2 really makes things simple compared to previous versions.


Andre

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

As Grub is new to redhat with 7.2 most people have experience with lilo on this. You can definitely do what you want with that. You can also exceed the 1024 cylinder limit as long as you have a modern motherboard which supports the extended bios 13h interrupt - see the 'lba32' comments here -->

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-7.2-Manual/install-guide/s1-upgrade-lilo.html

.

If you were using lilo you would do as indicated above, i.e. install winxp first and let it do its thing with the mbr. Then install linux and install lilo in the MBR (/dev/hda). When you reboot you will probably find that the winxp will not load. Thats because you need to chain load the nt boot loader rather than just boot the partition. To do this you boot to linux and then edit the /etc/lilo.conf file as root, changing the 'dos' (other) block to look like this :

other=/dev/hda1
label=winxp
chain=/boot/chain.b
unsafe

(where /dev/hda1 is your actual winxp partition - /dev/hda1 is the first partition on the first ide drive which is most likely to be correct).

You then re-write your boot loader into the MBR with the command :

/sbin/lilo -v

Then reboot and, hopefully, the 'winxp' option should chain load the m$ loader...

For grub it would be similar except that you wouldn't need to do anything other than simple edit the config file, i.e. /boot/grub/grub.conf . You'd add a block like this :

title Windows XP
unhide (hd0,0)
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
makeactive

Hope this helps