Hi I'm interested in Dual booting Linspire as primary master and winxp as primary slave. I will use Linspire most of the time but need access to winxp for gaming and uploading music to my zen mini. In the end what Id like is :

1.PC defaults to linspire boot with xp option
2.access to xp drive from within Linspire so I may add files
(music) mainly.
3.I'd really like to keep both OS on separate drives. and be able to read and write to xp from linspire..
(read & write does mean "view files & add files" right?)

I have no knowledge of linux at all....but I can follow instructions to the "T" so if anyone has a solution for this it be most appreciated.

P.S i can reinstall xp again if the process requires fat32, it is currently ntfs. also I remember reading somewhere that there is a way to "trick" xp into thinking its still master that way it can be slaved to a linux drive, anyone know anything about this?. Anyhow thanx for your time.

Well Windows needs to be on the primary partition of the harddrive (I think this is what you mean).
let's try to answer some stuff :

1. First install WindowsXP and then install Linspire (Linspire should detect the Windows XP installation and add it to the GRUB Bootloader, at least when you put them both on the same drive, I don't know about 2 drives but I guess it's the same). You can put Windows on the Primary master (C: drive in windows or hda in linux) and Linspire on the Primary slave (hdb).

2. Linux has problems with the NTFS filesystem (there is red support and limited write support, allthough I've heard writing to NTFS has improved a lot). What most people do is install windowsXP (I think you can't install XP onto a FAT/FAT32 partition) on NTFS and make a seperate partition (with partition magic, disk director, etc. etc.) that's formatted into fat32 (so both Linux and windows can access it's content).

3. see 2 and yes, IMHO read/write means view files and add files.

If reinstalling XP is not a problem for you I'd sugest giving it a try. Also note that when you re-install windows when Linspire (or any other Linux distro is installed) it might become unavailable (windows will probably remove the bootloader from the MBR) so always install Windows first.

okay so I should make xp as master and linux as slave...I can settle for that as long as they are still on separate drives. Also are you saying that I cant originally install xp with the fat32 format?....and that it "will" always install as ntfs?.....which I would then need to partition a fat32 format afterwards?

just trying to clarify...thanx

also would you have a link as to where I could get a step by step guide to do this.

Well I'm not sure about NTFS but as far as I know (AFAIK) WindowsXP needs NTFS (I don't even find an option to format into FAT32 anymore in XP with SP2). I can be wrong tough (it's possible the installer let's you select FAT or NTFS like with Windows 2000 but I doubt it).

Most people will make a 2nd partition on the windows drive and format that into FAT32, so for example:
you windows Harddrive is 80GB so they leave WinXP in a 20GB NTFS partition and they format the other partition as FAT/FAT32
this can be very easely be done with a program like Partition Magic (from Symantec) or DiskDirector (from Acronis) and with some other tools aswell.

Then you just install Linspire on the 2nd harddrive (might need to use the Advanced installer but I'm not sure).

I don't know of any step-by-step guides to do this, but it should be simple enough.

K ill give it a go by this weekend.....thank You soooo much for your help =)

Hey there, I'm interested in the same thing. That is, Linspire on the primary and Windows XP on the secondary. When I installed Linspire I already had Windows XP installed on the secondary. Linspire told me it would be able to dual boot. Linspire lied. Now I can run Linspire, but when I try to boot to XP it does not work.

So if I just re-install Windows XP on the secondary and set it to be the first boot device in the BIOS will I be able to boot to XP? Then when I want to boot to Linspire I could just change the first boot device back to the primary. I think it should work, but I don't want to mess everything up. Thoughts?