I have a Dual Boot system with FC2 and WinXP Home on two seperate hard drives, both of them have worked together great in the past, but I would like to set it up so that the MBR is not used in any way to boot into FC2, rather, I would like to be able to do one of two things, either boot straight into my full FC2 from a CD, rather than just the rescue mode, or the same, but with a floppy.

This way, i need not have my FC2 HD in the computer at all times to be able to boot into windows, and vice versa.


Is there a way to install grub or lilo or some other boot thingy onto either a floppy or create an iso that i can burn onto a CD to get into linux?


I know this question has been asked a couple of times before, but in all cases i saw, the original poster had multi-posted the thread and all threads were closed before an answer was given to my satisfaction.


Thanks for your help. and please be verbose as I am not fully versed in linux.

I don't see why this isn't possible...

This should help you to get a boot disk working:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4622

These are the instructions I followed after the FC2/XP dual boot problem blitzed my machine.

Get the grub boot floppy working first. I think the command you need is "configfile" to get the GRUB menu configured.

Once it is working, you should be able to create a bootable CD from the floppy image (consult your CD-writing software on how to do this)

Once you have it working to your satisfaction (and have of course backed up your hard drives ), remove GRUB from the MBR by booting from your XP CD , go into the XP recovery console and type "fixmbr", or get hold of a bootable DOS floppy that has fdisk, and enter "fdisk /mbr"

The machine should now boot directly into XP, or display the GRUB menu from the CD/floppy.

wow.... thanks so much for that info, looks like it won't be a problem now.