A little annoyed... which distro supports dual-boot?

Linkiboy · 05-19-2006, 05:15 PM

Hi. I would like to know which distro allows me to keep Windows easily bootable but still have Linux easily bootable. What I tried...

Damn Small Linux
Mepis
Slackware
Morphix

You're all smarter than me so help me out

Nylex · 05-19-2006, 05:19 PM

All of those should. I've never had problems dual booting with Windows and Slackware. Can you give us some more info about what went wrong?

Linkiboy · 05-19-2006, 05:22 PM

Slackware just doesn't work on my PC. All other install CD's do though. The Slackware CD which I burned multiple times never get recognized for some reason...

Oh and the other Distro's I just don't see an option to dual-boot.

Robhogg · 05-19-2006, 05:46 PM

I've not had experience with many distros, but setting up dual-booting with SuSE was easy (and establishing triple-booting wasn't much more difficult). Just remember to defrag before trying to resize partitions (the only disaster I had was when I didn't do this).

Rob

manishsingh4u · 05-19-2006, 06:13 PM

Quote:

Hi. I would like to know which distro allows me to keep Windows easily bootable

Well I have used
1) Redhat 7.3
2) Fedora Core
3) SuSE 9.1
4) K/Ubuntu 5.10
5) Mandrake 10.1 Official
6) Debian 3.1 r1
7) SimplyMEPIS 3.4-3

And all of them had no problems dual booting my Windows XP and Linux a single time (as far as I installed boot loader on MBR..how about u?)

mcmillan · 05-19-2006, 06:51 PM

Every distro can be set to dual boot, though not all configure it by default. I've only used mepis as a live cd and none of the others, but the process is pretty much the same. If you use grub (I know this is mepis) you edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to have a section like this:

#Windows
title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

I haven't used lilo (the other boot loader commonly seen) so I don't know how to edit that, but it should be much harder.

Linkiboy · 05-20-2006, 10:58 AM

Oh, I see. I guess I'm gonna get Fedora Core. What's the MBR by the way?

mcmillan · 05-20-2006, 11:05 AM

MBR measn Master Boot Record, which is where the main boot loader for the system is installed. This is what comes up when you first boot up the computer. You can install a boot loader other places, but need to use the chainloader command to access it. Installing to the MBR is usually the default option.

Linkiboy · 05-20-2006, 01:17 PM

So do I need to create another partition for it or does it intsall to my Linux partition?

Nylex · 05-20-2006, 01:19 PM

Neither, the MBR is the first 512 bytes of the disk.

Linkiboy · 05-20-2006, 01:45 PM

Thank you, time to attempt install again.

unixfool · 05-21-2006, 08:24 PM

When your download finishes, you should always check to see if the .iso is corrupted by using md5sum. If it's bad, I'd just download another .iso from another location. Of course, also do everything that everyone else here is telling you.