Okay, got another question that will help me with a new setup of Slack 9.1. I am now thinking that setting up a dual boot with XP and Slack 9.1 would be the best course of action for using Slack without losing the use of Windows (mostly for the woman).

I will be using the following Setup:
- Asus A7N8X (non deluxe) with NForce2 Chipset
- 80 GB Western Digital HD
- Two CD-ROMs (one being a burner)
- 665 MB DDR RAM

With these specs in mind...what would be the best way to set up a working dual boot? Such as...
Where should I store Lilo?
What kind of things will be needed to enable easier OS switching?
Should I make a third partition which has my music/vids/etc. so that both OSes can access them and how would this be done?
And a few other things....

If some of you will band together and help me out I will be most appreciative!

You can access your xp partition if you have ntfs support enabled in the kernel. If you want to use ntldr, don't install lilo on mbr.

Sounds great...but how is such a thing done?

You can insert the module using the insmod command, so insmod ntfs. then do a lsmod to see if it was inserted or not.

Install XP first then Slack second.

For XP use NTFS for the main install partition and create a separate FAT32 partition for sharing data - make sure when you do this you leave some free unpartitioned space to install Slack into later.

For Slack, use

cfdisk

during the install to create a

Root and
Swap

partition

install LILO to the MBR.

repost if any problems etc..

Heres my boot.ini, it boots xp, slackware 9.1 or xp recovery console

[boot loader]
timeout=15
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Pro"
c:\bootsect.lnx="Slackware 9.1"
C:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT="Microsoft Windows Recovery Console" /cmdcons

in my case, hda1 is xp ntfs, hda2 is linux swap and hda3 is / reiserfs.
to create bootsect.lnx make sure lilo is installed to the superblock or your linux boot partition (not mbr) and type the command,

dd if=/dev/hda3 of=/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1

then copy bootsect.lnx to the root of your xp partition, edit your boot.ini and reboot.

What I did was Change Xp's format to W95 DOS 32 bit and did a regular install, lilo finds both with no problems in either area...

Get control of the woman and tell her to learn Slack ;-)

Ok..which way works better? Letting LiLo find Windows during setup and then use it as a bootloader or setting up a loader with Windows XP...I would be willing to bet that it is more a matter of preference. And why should I reformat that shared partition as FAT? If I do as mentioned by snocked then I can just use lsmod and insmod to setup up Slack understanding of NTFS.

The reason is simply that Linux can't write to NTFS succesfully yet - therefor it's handy to use a filesystem which both OS's can read/write to/from ie FAT32.

See my reply in this thread for a how-to. It works well, and will assure that you have Windows available for the woman, and Linux for you without screwing anything up. If you plan to create a linux partition on the same drive used for Windows, be sure to defrag the hard drive in Windows beforehand to avoid data loss. Otherwise, a seperate hard drive for slack would be my recommendation



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