Is dual booting safe&stable w/linux?

[cyberdwarf]

I have a woody. I of course mean my other computer. It's plywood. The drive I took out of it was an attempt at dual booting 98se and suse linux. I'm taking a chance that someone somewhere in this crazy eXPerience has the, er, know-how to dual boot this second drive while it's in its little ol' removable bay in my XPmobile. What is the best boot loader that won't mess up the mbr, and what is the safest way to do this? I'm kinda new at all this, but I can use FDISK quite well, thank you. See, this is a hobby that's beginning to pay $ and I love to learn. I just don't want to crash my main computer. BTW, this is a 950 celery oc'd to 1.23 gb on a 200w power supply, 20g hd, cdrw, and 2nd 6.4 gb hd in a removable bay, msi board, blah blah blah. Well, whaddya think?

 

[Decepshun]

Look for a Program called Partition Magic Seven made by PowerQuest. WIthin lies your answer


Decepshun

 

[pc_tek]

i have dual booted with linux and win 9x/xp a hundred times using linux Lilo boot loader without a hitch.

I have also deleted linux 100 times (me and linux love to hate each other) without a hitch.

as far as partitions, some people will tell you that FDISK will remove linux partitions using the "non-dos" partition remover... ummm well i cant seem to do in FDISK. Either one, they are kidding themselves, or im one dumb SOB. Anyways, as mentioned, partition magic will remove or create linux partitions no problems.

As far as the master boot record, thats no problem. if you dual boot, go ahead and use the linux boot loader (lilo). if you ever decide to have a "love/hate" relationship with linux like i have and decide to remove it. just delete the linux partitions. this will leave lilo installed, but will still get the boot loader when booting. You can get rid of lilo to without problems.

to get back the default windows mbr:

win9x: open a dos window, then type FDISK/MBR and hit enter. then reboot, it will boot straight into windows.

NT/XP: alittle different than 9x. Boot from the bootable NT/XP cd rom disk. choose the repair option, once you get to the repair console, type HELP, this will list all of the commands. Look for the fixboot command. I am working off memory (which isnt that good), but i think you type something like /FIXBOOT and then hit enter. reboot and it will boot straight into NT/XP.

Hope this answers your questions.

 

[natasrof1]

Dual booting linux and NT

I am currently running xp and redhat 7.something on two different drives and am using ntloader to do it, it worked in win2k and it's working on xp. see if it helps you. I'm not a linux pro by any means but this is what I did. I installed Linux on my second drive and you must create a startup disk or you won't be able to get back in to linux when you reboot. then in Linux I copied some file to disk and put it in c:\, then I added a line to the boot.ini file and when I restarted XP gave me the option of loading itself or linux.
http://www.enterprisedt.com/publications/dual_boot.html
something like that.

 

[ToolPackinMama]

Originally posted by cyberdwarf
I have a woody. I of course mean my other computer. It's plywood. The drive I took out of it was an attempt at dual booting 98se and suse linux. I'm taking a chance that someone somewhere in this crazy eXPerience has the, er, know-how to dual boot this second drive while it's in its little ol' removable bay in my XPmobile. What is the best boot loader that won't mess up the mbr, and what is the safest way to do this? I'm kinda new at all this, but I can use FDISK quite well, thank you. See, this is a hobby that's beginning to pay $ and I love to learn. I just don't want to crash my main computer. BTW, this is a 950 celery oc'd to 1.23 gb on a 200w power supply, 20g hd, cdrw, and 2nd 6.4 gb hd in a removable bay, msi board, blah blah blah. Well, whaddya think?

I prefer to write LILO to a floppy. When I want to boot Linux I just pop in the floppy. That leaves your MBR untouched. That way if you want to remove all traces of Linux later you simply wipe the partition.

OTOH you may decide to dump XP in the end. I like dual booting because I'm still learning Linux, and I still depend on Windows for a lot. I'd like to be Microsoft-free someday.

It does really help to use a third party partitioning tool like Partition Commander or Partition Magic. Of course, Linux install can repartition and format for itself, and since you have a separate drive for Linux it's less dangerous. Letting Linux install resize your windows partition etc is perilous - better to set up space for Linux ahead of time.

 

[dArK_CyAnIdE]

tool thats one heck of a good idea lol i dont believe ive never thought of it thx

 

[Sazar]

yah... if you dual boot with linux it works pretty good IF you have partitioned properly...

my friend has XP and linux dual booting... I used to have win2k and linux but it takes forever for linux to boot now so I just wiped it and saved my diskspace for XP to use

so yeah... it works... can work well if you set it up right

 

[dArK_CyAnIdE]

well i used to have lilo installed on my drive along with linux.. and when i uninstalled linux.. let me tell you it screwed up my booting bad lol .. my dad fixed it =) thx dad =p since im not very fasmiliar with linux i just left lilo on and didnt use it much... now i have a new pc and am not planning to install linux on it.. ill let it go on my other pc =p no more trouble for me =p