Dual booting redhat 9 with windows XP using GRUB
 

Hello all,

I apoligise now for making yet another thread about dual booting using GRUB, but I've searched the threads but have not found a solution to the problem I am experinceing.

I have a laptop that I wish to dual boot. I want to use redhat 9 and windows XP, which I sure is possible.

I have partitioned the hard drive as follows:

linux swap = 512MB
ext3 = 8GB
NTFS = 10GB

I have windows XP installed first since M$ products tend to erase the boot section of other OSes. I then installed redhat 9, things were going ok. GRUB detected another OS and made an entry for it. Then I rebooted ........

Grub loaded and displayed the two options, redhat 9 and windows XP. If I choose redhat, all goes well and loads properly.
If I choose windows XP, it displays:

dos
rootnoverify
chainloader +1

and then just sits there.

I've tried editing the grub.conf file as instucted in previous threads by adding lines such as hide, unhide but nothing I have found has been able to make the windows XP partition boot.

I would be very greatful if anyone here has a definite answer or could point me to a web page that will help me make this setup work.

Have I missed something really simple here ???? Does grub support NTFS partitions?????

thanks for any assistance you can offer.

Post your grub file then someone may be able to help. also is the bootloader on the MBR? and if you desperatly need to get into windows try using your XP setup cd.

I just did this a week ago :). The only difference from what you're trying to do is that I'm still using XP's boot loader. Here's a recent HOWTO:

http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux...w2k-HOWTO.html

...based on the same ideas in the old NT dual-boot HOWTO, from '97:

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Linux+NT-Loader.html

Usually I install windows first, and create two partitions on the HD - one at 5-10Gb NTFS for windows, one at ~1Gb fat32 for a shared drive. I leave the rest of the space unpartitioned. Then I go through the complete windows install as normal. Then when I do the linux install (RH 9, last week), I have it partition the remaining HD space for itself (I usually muck about with their suggested layout a little, but that's neither here nor there). I also have it mount that ~1Gb share drive under something nonsensical like "/share". For the boot loader, I choose grub but have it install on the boot partition rather than the MBR.

The HOWTOs above give the details about how to use dd to make an image of your boot loader and copy it over to XP (here's where that "/share" mount comes in handy, rather than having to use a floppy), and edit XP's boot.ini file accordingly (while you're in there, I suggest setting the timeout to something more reasonable than 30 seconds, like maybe 5; also, you can change the default OS if you like). Also, the HOWTOs mention needing a linux boot floppy for the first boot, but using the install cd and booting as "linux rescue" works fine.

The only slightly odd result of this method is that you first get the command-line OS boot options from XP's boot loader, and when you choose linux you then get grub's OS boot options (if you let it keep it as an option in the install). On the plus side, if you set XP's default to boot into linux and set the timeout low, this would give you a second chance to catch it and boot into XP after all, if that's what you meant to do. See? It's a feature, not a bug ;).

Anyway, this is generally how I've done it several times in the past, with general success on both laptops and desktops. I've never tried putting grub on the MBR because I know this way works and I've never wanted to spend the time installing two OSes twice if it didn't work out ;).