*deep sigh* Transgaming is too busy screwing with Wow and HL2 and ignoring the other Windows games that dont work in Linux, so I'm near ready to break down to do a dual boot.

I have Suse on hda1 with reisier FS, and hda2 is ext3, but I can use Partition Magic and shrink that and then create a partition for Windows. Fat32 is recommended right, for safely writing to that partition under linux?

Will it work to have Windows on hdb, and linux on hda? I have read that Windows will overwrite my MRB, leaving me unable to get into linux
YIKES,, since I havetn done any of this yet, is there a way to back up my MBR to restore it later, or er , what do I need to do first, so that I'll be able to get into Suse in the future, and somehow add XP to the Suse bootloader, if that is possible. I'll be a first time dual booting for me.

I think you can make a boot 3,5" floppy to start Linux from and then maybe restore the old suse grub.

so you want XP and Suse on seperate hard drives? Alright, well first install each of the OS's on their own drive and make sure they both boot properly, just connect one HD at a time and test them. If they both boot fine set up the SUSE HD as the master drive and Windows XP HD as the slave drive. If you want to use GRUB as your boot loader, boot into suse. Open up /boot/grub/menu.lst with your text editor of choice and add:

note: that is a tab before each entry under the title and spaces between map (hd0) (hd1), so it's like this.

title Windows XP
[tab]map[space](hd0)[space](hd1)
[tab]map[space](hd1)[space](hd0)
[tab]rootnoverify[space](hd1,0)
[tab]chainloader[space]+1

I did that because it is picky, I didn't put a space between chainloader and the +1 once and it wouldn't boot windows. Also sometimes when I go through tutorials I can't tell if it is a space or not and I just have to guess.

I hope this works for you, good luck.

The original boot CD should offer some kind of repair function to restore grub after the Windows installation. http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2003/1...em-Repair.html

I would not recommend FAT32 for performance reasons. If you want to use Windows for gaming, there is no need to have write access from Linux. If you really want to transfer data, create a small FAT32 partition for this purpose.

You can install Linux on hda and Windows on hdb, but it's just easier to install Windows first then Linux. Doing Linux first and then Windows would require you have to do a variety of followup steps, which can be avoided entirely by doing Windows first, then Linux. (And Yes, Windows will overwrite your MBR) Why do extra work if you don't have to?

If your concern is to have Windows and Linux be installed on specific drives, just move the target drive for Windows into the primary master position if it is not there already. The target drive for Linux can then be moved to the primary slave position (or either of the secondary positions). Good luck with it -- J.W.

With my above post, I am dual booting Suse 9.3 and Windows 2000 on seperate drives and all I had to do was edit the menu.lst after installing the operating systems seperate and Windows boots perfect. This method doesn't require you to reinstall the operating systems if they are already installed on seperate drives. If you are installing both OSes again or just suse, then J.W's advice will help you. Good luck.

Because Suse is already installed and set up justtt the way I want. Programs and games, etc and configuration, and extra packages.


I just realized that partition magic doesnt run in linux :P
I have read a bit about qparted, does it do non-destructive paritioning, that isnt made clear, it says it resizes but doesnt mention if data is lost when it does that. Also I have read that the partition needs to be unmounted, aka, I should do this from a live-cd/dvd.

I have 2 hard drives. Master is Reisier fs, and Slave is ext3

Doesnt really matter which drive I use, either has enough room to drop down 30 or 40 gigs. I didnt know it would be so much work. Lilo has this thing where you boot which the floppy and then type lilo and it reinstalls lilo again. Grub I was hoping had some similiar thing.

I snagged a new driver for Windows. An IDE drive on a sata adapter plugged into my sata onboard. So i'll have

hda1 Linux
hda2 Storage
sda Windows

Im not sure if Sata controller would take priority in bios boot (couldnt find a sata boot option there)

Would the procedure be the same for grub, assuming that IDE still has priority?

title Windows XP
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1