linux-xp dual boot
 

if i install windows xp pro on a 40 gig hard drive, and a flavor of linux (mandrake, redhat, or suse at this point) on a seperate 20 gig hard drive, to designate which os i want to boot i'll just have to set bios to boot to the primary or the secondary drive, right?

feel dumb for asking, but never tried this kind of dual boot

you could let lilo handle the booting duties.

or you could make a small fat partition and install bootmagic to it.

i'd prefer bootmagic, because down the road if you ever have a problem with the linux drive you won't have to deal with fixing the boot record to get xp booting.

i found the easiest way for me to deal with it was to get one of those removable hard drive cases. Install Linux to it and set it as the primary boot device. Install Windows to the other drive as a secondary boot device. Now all you have to do, is turn the key on the Linux drive, and it will boot into Linux. Turn it off, and you boot into Windows. Dont hafta worry about one system depending on another to be able to select it to boot, no fancy bios stuff, and you dont have to keep selecting which OS to boot into every time it starts up.

Something like this
http://www.compgeeks.com/images/150x...GN210-unit.gif
All you hafta do is turn the key on the right.

How does the BIOS recognize it? Are you just putting it on a different IDE channel?

Interesting.

First off, I wouldn't suggest Fedora Core 2 for a dual-boot situation. I would definitely use latest Mandrake or SuSE. Fedora Core 2 has a *very* nasty bug in it that can stop dual booting from working.

That said, you should be able to pop in the distro's boot cd, do the install, and it'll likely handle the dual-boot stuff. Every distro comes with a boot loader/manager (i.e. Lilo or Grub). When your computer boots up, it firsts goes to them.. and they'll prompt you with a menu of your OS's, so you can choose what to boot into. No BIOS changes needed.

That said... I'd suggest having WinXP as your primary drive, and put Linux on a secondary. Linux can handle being installed on a secondary drive. WinXP can't (it will overwrite your boot loader w/ it's own.. causing headaches). When I had a linux drive already, and wanted to put WinXP on my second drive.. I had to take out the Linux drive, make the WinXP drive the primary drive, install on that.. and then restore my setup w/ my Linux drive the primary drive.

After that, it was a bit of a challenge getting WinXP to boot (but at least I could boot into Linux to play w/ my Grub configuration). Using grub, I was able to swap the hard drive order (virtually), fooling windows into thinking it was still the primary drive, and booting into it without problems. Still, lots of googling and frustration to get me to that point.

the easiest way to set up a dual-boot is definitely with the pull-trays.

"How does the BIOS recognize it?" You set it to "Auto" and it just does. No play, just plug.

The second easiest way (specifically for NT/2K/XP and Linux) is to just use the NT bootloader. Make a boot disk during Linux installation. Install LILO or Grub to the partition superblock - not the MBR! - and then use dd to write that to a file. copy the file to a diskette, reboot into Windows, copy the file to c:\ and add an entry to your boot.ini

The simple HOWTO for doing this. MUCH easier than I just made it sound...I've done this on at least a dozen machines in NT, 2000, and XP, and various versions of Red Hat and *gag* Caldera Linux.

I wouldn't classify hardware purchases as "easiest," but that's just me.

Anyway, just install XP on your primary drive first, then linux on your secondary drive. The distro that you choose will almost definitely install grub or lilo (I prefer grub...no intervention needed when you upgrade the kernel) in the MBR of the primary drive, allowing you to choose which drive to boot at startup, no new hardware or commercial boot managers needed. If you install linux first, windows will overwrite the MBR of you primary drive and require you to reinstall grub...not too difficult, but daunting for a linux newbie.

Lots of folks seem to be under the impression that grub/lilo can't boot XP...that is not the case. Let them take over your MBR and proceed to dual boot happiness without spending any cash (although I would pay attention to the warnings about FC2).

thanks cthulu, went over without a hitch. greatly appreciative, and thanks for the grub recommendation to.

Yeah, FC2 is more like a RH/Fedora version of kdenonbeta, but with an operating system attached.

I have to amend my earlier statement. If you use a different name for any new kernel that you have installed, you'll have to edit the contents of the grub config file (usually called grub.conf or menu.lst). Most distros automatically perform this function as part of the kernel upgrade process. This detail slipped my mind earlier.

haven't gotten around to updating the kernel yet, but the install of mandrake on the secondary hdd with grub as the bootloader on the primary hdd was a complete success, just as easy as any other time i've reformatted