Making dualboot w/o cd-rom, floppy but XP installed
 

Hello.
I just got very nice and small laptop - lifebook b142. it has xp installed on it, pcmcia LAN, 4gb hdd and thats pretty much about it. USB too, but i dont have any devices to attach there. repartioned hdd - 2gb for win, 200mb for swap lin and 1800 to linux native. my question is - how can i make it boot to linux install?
i tried to use loadlin, but surfed forums and it seems that it acts strangely under xp. mine gave me message of having too little memory.
has any1 experience with particular problem, where you have xp on, and want to make it dual-boot ?

thnx,
Marko

Dont quite understand what you are saying but here go's.
If you dont have a version of linux installed. Mandrake , Red Hat have dos utilities that can write the boot image to a floppy. Then you can boot off the floppy and load linux. Then in the loading process linux will pick up XP as being there and add it to the boot loader. Then you have the option of installing the boot loader to your HD or floppy. Up to you. But if you want a true dual boot then install it to your HD.
Then when you restart you have the chioce of Xp or Linux.

thnx for reply, but i already gave up - i can boot only to xp from my hdd, dont have floppy nor cd-rom.
Seems like my only choice is to take out hdd and install it elsewhere.
(which is damn difficult cuz of laptops design).

best regards
Marko

If you wanted to use loadlin, you would need to install MSDOS on your laptop since XP does not have true MSDOS on it.

I think there are some tutorials on the MS website as to how to get MSDOS installed and you should be able to dual-boot XP and MSDOS.

I was also wondering how your XP partition was formatted? If it's NTFS, then you will not be able to put the linux disk images there for a HD install.

make a 98 boot disk from bootdisk.com and type

format X: /s

that will make you an MSDOS partition on partition X then you can add a bootloader

I have XP and LILO works fine....