Quote:
Originally Posted by pixellany
Since you have installed Fedora in automatic mode, you will now need to re-install Windows.<snip>
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Not always true. When I installed FC6 on this laptop in automatic mode, the installer divided my 80Gb HD into two partitions: A 40GB NTFS one with XP on it, and another 40GB partition for the Fedora logical volume. (O.K., it was actually 4 partitions: hda1 for XP, a small hda2 FAT for the Gateway "recovery" miniNT, a small hda3 for
/boot and hda5 for the logical volume. (hda4 if the "extended" partition, overlapping hda5.) It looks like this:
Code:
$ sudo /sbin/fdisk -l /dev/hda
Password:
Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 894 5730 38853202+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 1 893 7172991 b W95 FAT32
/dev/hda3 5731 5743 104422+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda4 5744 9729 32017545 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 5744 9729 32017513+ 8e Linux LVM
Partition table entries are not in disk order
The point is that the NTFS resizing was done as part of the automatic process, without loosing any XP functionality.
You may note that the active partition is hda1, so XP is booted. That's because Gateway, in its infinite wisdom, had the BIOS written so that the miniNT partition (not even active) is booted first, and the miniNT checks for XP on the HD before booting hda1. If it doesn't find XP there, it starts a "recovery" process, which is a pain. If it find it there, it boots to it.
So I had to set up the XP
boot.ini to boot into Fedora for me. Unless you've got one of these "brain-dead BIOS" system, you should be fine as you are. For those who're interested, here's what my
boot.ini looks like:
Code:
$ cat /mnt/WinXP/c/boot.ini
[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=C:\linux.bin
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
C:\linux.bin="Fedora"
The "linux.bin" file was created by installing GRUB on hda3, and then doing a
dd of the first 512 bytes of hda3 to a file on hda2, which was then copied (using XP) to XP's C: drive. This process is described in more detail elsewhere in these forums.