Dual Boot Linux and Windows XP

themarcus

I'm running windows xp on a 200gb sata hard drive and plan on installing SUSE Linux 9.1 on another 10Gb IDE hard drive on the same pc. Could anyone suggest what I should do regarding booting up?

Mountjoy Mugger

As far as I know, you can only have one hard disk for your OSes - this will be set as your master HD. You'll need to create partitions on this and have Linux on one, XP on another partition.

Something like Partition Magic should help you create a dual boot.


I'm sure I'll be corrected if I said something wrong.

aidan_walsh

Mountjoy Mugger wrote:

I'm sure I'll be corrected if I said something wrong.

Where do we begin?

You can put OSes on secondary hard disks, just not copies of Windows. Linux will happily go where you want it to though. Windows also demands to be on a primary partiton, not a logical one, where again, Linux will be happy just to have space at all.

Partition Magic will do to create partitions, as will the installer of any half decent Linux distro. Partition Magic will not, however, on its own be enough to provide a dual boot. It does come with an application called PQBoot, but that only recognises primary partitions, not logical ones. As such, its no good for Linux if you only have one disk, or place it on a logical partition.

Nearly all Linux distros will come with one of two boot managers, called LILO or Grub. These will allow you to boot to whatever you want, ia a simple menu that will show on screen before either OS starts. Again, the Linux installer should step you through this.

is_that_so

Use Partition Magic to grab back the space you need from the Windows partition and put in the Linux CD and away you go. Once you have either of the boot managers installed it's a piece of cake.

Alvis

The Yast installer that comes with Suse should be well able to set up Linux on that 10 gb hard drive. The installer will automatically install Grub (as default) on the MBR of your first primary hard drive (I think) and that will enable you to choose whether you want to boot to windows or linux on each startup.

Capt'n Midnight

Plan B

Make a windows boot disk
Format a floppy in windows copy boot.ini ntldr and ntdetect.com to it
make suer you can boot into windows from it.

themarcus

Thanks for the feedback guys. I'll fool around with partition magic and see what i can do... cheers

MrPinK

You won't need partition magic if it's going on it's own drive. You'd only need partition magic if you wanted to resize the windows partition to make more room. Yast should take care of everything for you, partitioning the second drive, mounting the windows partitions if you want to, and setting it up to dual boot.

theexis

aidan_walsh wrote:

You can put OSes on secondary hard disks, just not copies of Windows. Linux will happily go where you want it to though. Windows also demands to be on a primary partiton, not a logical one, where again, Linux will be happy just to have space at all.

This is incorrect. Regardless of the OS, (and unless you boot from CD or Floppy) there always need to be a boot loader program installed on the active partition of the primary hard drive. For Windows this is ntldr. This reads the boot.ini file to display the boot menu and can boot into Windows sitting an any addressable partition and hard drive; e.g. a machine with 3 installation of windows on partitions 1 and 2 (first hard disk) and partitition 2 (second hard disk)

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="First installation"
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Second installation"
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Third installation"

osmethod

aidan_walsh wrote:

You can put OSes on secondary hard disks, just not copies of Windows. Linux will happily go where you want it to though. Windows also demands to be on a primary partiton, not a logical one, where again, Linux will be happy just to have space at all.

Not strictly correct. You can have copies of windows on 2nd, 3rd etc hard disks and yes they will boot.

theexis wrote:

This is incorrect. Regardless of the OS, (and unless you boot from CD or Floppy) there always need to be a boot loader program installed on the active partition of the primary hard drive.

Not strictly correct. The Master Boot Record has 4 table entries which contain the locations of bootable partitions. When a partition is considered active it just has its entry in the table flagged as bootable i.e. The MBR points to the Partition Boot Record of this flagged partition from which to boot the stored OS respectively.

As a note of interest perhaps, the MBR only knows how to boot from the 1st physical hard disk i.e. 80. 2nd hard disk is considered 81 etc.... When booting Oses from 2nd,3rd etc disks, the MBR (or boot loader stored there) changes the disk number to 80 to pass a specific piece of bios code restriction, then returning to the original disk number 81, 82 etc.

osmethod