Attempting to dual-boot - Scariness
 

I had WinXP installed and I wanted to dual-boot to Slack - I've never used XP but we had it so I figured it was time. My roommate's even more computer illiterate than I am, so I have to run some sort of Windows for her. Anyway, I created my partition, installed Slack into it and everything seemed to be working fine. . .

But Lilo recognized the Windows without my telling it to, which I thought was cool, except now it won't boot into Windows. It errors out saying that it can't find the autocheck and another file, whose name I seem to have misplaced at this moment...

o_o

Any suggestions?

I am having a similiar issue only my boot loader is grub. I edited grub.conf to see windows. But when I chose to boot to wondows it of course crashed as yours did, AND it screwed my mbr all up so that Linux greub was no longer there or being used upon a reboot...aka no option to boot to linux. So I reinstalled grub and now I have linux again, but no windows...on top of that my usb(and only mouse) stopped working altogether.

So in short I need help with the same business.

Herm. Well, I'm flipping through TFM and bothering friends... if I get it straightened out for me, I'll be sure to let you know as well. :)

did you make a linux boot disk, cause in my opinion, boot off of a windows boot disk and run "fdisk /mbr" or on some newer windows "fixmbr"

then whenever you want linux, simply put in the floppy and let it boot from there

when I first started with Linux I had this type of problem. I've never used Slack so I can't speak about that but on some other distros you have the option of where to install the bootloader.

First, you need to partition your hard drive so Windows is on the primary partition and all the linux partitions are on the extended.

example:

100GB HDD
50GB Primary partition with windows
50GB Extended partition (I'd let your distro auto-allocate the partitions)

Then make sure you have the boot loaded installed on the "first sector of the MBR"

Once I figured this out I've never had problems again. However if you re-write the MBR (ex reinstalling windows) you will lose GRUB/LILO and your ability to boot into Linux.

Okay... It's an 80 GB drive (slightly less, we all know, but hey)
First is WIndows partition, then my swap, then my Linux. It's a Lilo...

I have to... uhhh... o_O Do what, to avoid losing my Linux?

What happens when you try to boot to windows after the error? Does the computer restart, shutdown or hang there forever? If it shuts down, I may have a solution...

If it does shutoff, maybe your windows partition got hidden. You have to use a partitionmagic rescue boot disk to fix that.