Mandrake 9.2 & Win XP

cyberkat75 · 03-23-2004, 06:52 AM

I recently formatted an extra 40g hard drive. I installed it as primary slave on my P4 pc which had a 60 g hard drive installed as primary master with XP. I installed Mandrake 9.2 on the slave and XP was deleted.
I reinstalled XP on the master drive but set it as primary slave and made the Linux drive primary master. I reinstalled Linux and it ran ok but when I reboot it gives the options for Windows but windows did not boot up. When I changed the XP drive back to primary master and the linux drive to primary slave, XP worked but no linux. So basically, I have two separate drives that only work when each is connected as primary master. I am brand new to linux so nothing is obvious to me.
What did I do wrong and how do I fix it?

b0uncer · 03-23-2004, 07:03 AM

I haven't dealt that much with XP, and this sounds like a joke for me (I mean, it's not funny you have to go through this type of thing, but it sounds just so dump that windows-linux dual boot installation can be this difficult many times...I had problems too when I started my very first linux back in the days)

Where did you choose to install your boot loader, by the way? In MBR, or in some partition? I'm not sure if this has anything to do with these, but..one never knows. At least in older Windows versions, installing windows often destroyed linux's bootloader, and because Windows's own bootloader didn't boot linux, I had to do some tricks (that was win98 then) to get over this problem, especialy if I had to reinstall windows (which wasn't that rare thing)

Did you let Mandrake do all the configuration "automatically" or something, or did you do them "by hand"?

njbrain · 03-23-2004, 07:03 AM

Setting XP as "Master", and Linux as "Slave" should work. However, create a small 75 meg partition at the beginning of the master hard drive, and mount is as "/boot".

b0uncer · 03-23-2004, 07:11 AM

(boot-partition-thing above is just the thing I had to do with my old win98 to get things work..MBR screwed things up)

cyberkat75 · 03-25-2004, 10:16 AM

njbrain thanks. I will try to add the 75meg partition to the master drive. I was also told to reformat the linux drive and start over but I will try your way first.