RH 7.2 dual boot w/ windows 98

[kpdvx]

Hi-
I've dual booted before, i had slackware 8 installed, and i had win2k installed in the primary partition. However, i didnt let slack write to the MBR, it gave me the option of making a boot floppy, so whenever i wanted to use linux, i just stuck in the floppy durring boot, and whenever i wanted to run windows, i just turned the computer on as normal.I just got a copy of RedHat 7.2, and i want to dual boot with windows 98. I want to use GRUB to manage the two OS's. How do i do this? I think maybe i install 98 as usual into a small (5gig) partition, and set it as active, like i normally would. Then i would install RH7.2 into the rest of my free space. Durring the install, tell it to use grub, to write to the mbr, and to have windows as the default OS. Since i set windows as the default OS, wouldnt it add Windows' boot info to that of GRUB's? Would this work this way? Also, i think RH7.2 installs into 3 partitions, /, /boot, and a swap. So altogether that is 4 paritions, can i have 4 partitions without having an extended partition? Let me know if i am right/wrong about my assumtions. Thanks in advance.

-Skyler

 

[jmadjeski]

You're right about using GRUB and write to the MBR. However, you don't have to set the windows partition as the default just to get it to show up on the boot loader screen. To get Windows to show up, you just have to make sure that you give that partition a label for the boot loader.

e.g. In the setup for GRUB during installation of RH7.2, you'll notice that the Linux install is set as the default boot with a label of "Red Hat Linux". In that same box, you'll see you Windows partition, just select that and label it "Win98" or "windows" or "Barry". It doesn't really matter. Only label the windows install as the default if you want your machine to boot into windows if you don't choose anything else in the 30 seconds that grub gives you.

As to your question about extended partitions, you can certainly have 4 partitions with no extended as long as the 3 other partitions are non-windows partitions. Your linux partitions will be unreadable to Win98, so the OS will treat them as if they're not even there.

Hope I've helped!
-joe

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

Just to add on the partitions - the limit on primaries is four but you should be aware that you won't be able to add any more later if you use all four as primaries. Linux works perfectly fine from logical partitions so it might be more flexible to make at least one of the four an extended partition which then allows logical partitions within. In other words you can have 3 primaries, 1 extended with x logical partitions or 4 primaries with no logical partitions possible.

If you use logical partitions they are labelled /dev/hda5, /dev/hda6, etc upwards irrespective of how many primaries there are .

Also, remember to put grub in /dev/hda (MBR) not /dev/hda1 !

Hope this helps

 

[kpdvx]

hmm.. thanks for your info, it helped a lot. But.. I have a 30gig partition (fat32, or vfat, whatever) for storage, and i had a windows part. as primary. whenever RH tried to create its partitions, it said it couldn't create them.. i thought it had to do w/ my storage part, which is in an extended partition. Any Ideas?

 

[progressdll]

Good article on dual boot

http://www.linuxorbit.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=470

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

Presumably, the whole drive is full so maybe you have to resize the 30gb partition outside of linux to free up some space to make new partitions. See -->

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/...de/ch-partitions.html#S2-PARTITIONS-MAKE-ROOM

You can use fips for this which is a 'dos' executable provided on the redhat cdrom (see

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-7.2-Manual/install-guide/dualboot-fips.html)

or a commercial product like partition magic which is probably the most widely used tool for this purpose.

Hope this helps

 

[kpdvx]

what are the required partitions (these are partitions, right) at a bare for a 7.2 install- I'm thinking, / /boot, and /swap. I can only have 3 linux parts, as I need a windows partition, and my extended partition is full, thanks for your help.

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

Redhat recommend a minimum of three :

swap
/
/boot

(

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/...de/ch-partitions.html#S2-PARTITIONS-HOW-MANY)

However, its perfectly possible to just have two :

swap
/

Regards