[luau] Dual Booting with WinXP Pro

[Eric Hattemer]

I don't agree with this either.  First, can you give me a good reason
why your XP system partition can't be fat32?  

As far as extended partitions, I really don't like them.  I try to keep
as few partitions as possible.  On my old computer, I had a lot of
extended partitions.  Eventually, their boundaries started to drift, and
chaos ensued.  This could have been partly because of partition magic,
which I don't trust either.  The other thing I hate about many
partitions is managing the space between them.  I've had systems in
which I made many partitions and even drivespace partitions
additionally.  Every time one of them starts to fill, you need to
uninstall things from it, then install it to another partition.  

Now on a big server, you can have all the mount points you want, but
more than likely these will be separate hard drives or raid arrays.  

Now grub, I don't know about.  I only used grub for about a month when I
had redhat 8 or some beta on here.  It suddenly became the default boot
loader for redhat.  But its not well supported in mandrake, so its off
now.  But there is a grub command that reinstalls grub as far as I
know.  Look into how grub installs itself.  I'm not sure.

I've never really considered sharing partitions between multiple
distros.  That just sounds scary to me.  I don't think the packaging
systems could keep track of things properly.  So I'll stick to a clean
format each change. 

I believe linux needs a non-chain-loading boot loader in order to work. 
So you could try this, but I'm not sure it'll work:

Set lilo to install to the linux / or /boot.  Set grub to be in the MBR
Set lilo to have a 0 delay and automatically select the best kernel.
Install windows
In windows, set the active partition to linux.
Reboot
Reinstall grub.  

This is assuming that grub can't install itself to a particular
partition.  If it can, that might be a better way to go.

-Eric Hattemer

On Fri, 2002-11-08 at 02:05, W. Wayne Liauh wrote:
> Also, since it is well known that Linux doesn't write NTFS files very 
> well, it is almost mandatory in a dual boot system to have a separate 
> FAT32 partition to store data which will be shared by Linux and XP.  The 
> number of partitions in a well designed Windows/Linux dual-boot system 
> should always be greater than 4, thus, necessating the need for extended 
> partitions.
> 
> > Even with a workstation/desktop, I always keep at least a separate 
> > /home partition in extended partition. Since I have to run Win4Lin, I 
> > am also keeping /var and /opt in separate partitions.  (The main 
> > reason you keep separate partitions is that, when you re-install a new 
> > distro, you don't have to re-format them.)
> >
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