Dual Booting
 

Hiya,
I've been trying to set up a dual boot system for windows and Red Hat 9.0 for quite some time, but never been able to get it to work. I'm not a complete muppet and use unix systems at work, but have no luck here.

I have a new xp 2500 athlon, gigabyte ga-7n400 pro2 motherboard (nforce chipset), geforce fx 5200 gfx card, 512 mb ram and a 120gb drive.

I've tried the using instructions from
(I've been barred from placing full url in but a search for
grub-w2k-HOWTO in google, top entry)

and done the following, on the primary master partition.
Made 3 partitions, a 11gb primary NTFS with xp installed, rest of disk in extended partition. Made a 30 and 35Gb FAT32 partition for sharing files.

All this worked, luckily enough, showing I built the pc ok.

I then tried installing RH9 from checked install disks on the remaining space in the extended partition, making a 100mb boot partition, 10gb root, 18gb usr and a 1gb swap file, installing grub on the boot partition, forcing lba.

I made a boot floppy, unfortunately it gives me the following errors;

unknown keyword in syslinux.cfg
could not find kernal image: linux

when I use it.

When I use the install disk in rescue mode I cannot mount the fat32 partition (hda5) or the floppy drive to copy the linux boot sector to.

My next step would be to run the following command,
dd if=/dev/"hda of boot sector" of=/mnt/floppy/linux.bin bs=512 count=1

then copy it onto the windows partition.

Apologies for using windows, I need to move gradually! Any help would be greatly appreciated. I really want to make linux work and start using it as it seems the way forward.

It's awkward as I can't really get any better with this os until I get a working version.

Best regards
Jim

What do you mean when you say you installed GRUB on the "boot partition"? - its handy to have it in the MBR.

Dual booting
 

I installed it on the /boot partition i created so that it didn't stop the XP partition booting. I don't know if newer installations of Linux can recognise what is originally on the MBR and take this into account allowing the booting of either.

Have I been overcomplicating the problem?
Best regards
Jim

Well... on average, there shouldn't be too much of a problem - if your still concerned, you might want to back up all your XP data first etc - a quick search on this site for "dual boot redhat xp" or something similar should give you some helpful information - after reading more, its up to you whether you still consider it too risky to put GRUB or LILO on the MBR - personally, haven't had any problems putting either LILO or GRUB on the MBR to fascilitate a Linux/Windows dual/multiboot