[luau] Dual Booting with WinXP Pro

[Eric Hattemer]

I am thoroughly confused at this email.  First, when you say "dual
booting", are you refering to two versions of Windows?  If not, then
there is almost no order required.  You get 4 primary partitions on your
system (make sure you partition with win > NT or linux).  The first
sector of your disk is the MBR, and points to the first sector of the
partition which will be booted.  This can be any of the 4 primary
partitions.  There are rules like that the start of that partition
cannot be over 8GB, and that it can't be an extended partition, but I
believe both of those rules can be cicumvented in most modern
situations.  

When you install lilo to the MBR, it is the first thing that comes up
when your system is booted.  It then selects which of those partitions
will be booted.  For linux it automatically starts reading the kernel
and etc.  For windows, it does a thing called chain loading, where it
starts the windows partition boot sector, and then windows starts
loading its own kernel.  Sometimes people in linux create a boot
partition, which holds the kernel and whatnot.  This is especially
useful for software raid or odd root filesystems that can't easily be
booted from lilo.  You might want to put that at the beginning of the
disk, but it really shouldn't matter.  It should be below 8GB, but other
than that, it can go wherever.  Generally the windows partition should
start under the 8GB mark.  But like I said earlier, I'm almost sure that
doesn't matter even in win98.

Now if you're depending on the windows bootloader in boot.ini, then
that's probably a different story.  However, its a story that I know
little about.  As long as you have linux on the system, you should
probably use lilo or grub.  If not, you still might consider it or
another 3rd party boot loader.  If you are using windows boot loader,
then I believe the NT-style OS should be first, but I could be wrong.  

-Eric Hattemer

On Thu, 2002-11-07 at 12:34, W. Wayne Liauh wrote:
> When dual-booting with Win98, of course, Windows must be in the first 
> partition.  However, I remember this (i.e., the Windows be in the first 
> partition) is not necessary with Win2000.
> 
> Does anyone know whether I can put WinXP Pro in a non-first partition?
> 
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