Has anyone done this and if so can you provide step by step instructions.

Use this link
http://www.aboutdebian.com/dualboot.htm

It worked flawlessly for me.
Good luck.

You don't want to dual boot using the windows bootloader. It is (intentionally) really poor at booting anything except multiple versions of windows.

If you insist on doing it, (it's the wrong choice, as google will be glad to confirm) google for ntbootloader and linux.

The default way to dual boot using grub keeps the windows bootloader in place, but puts grub in the MBR. When you select windows, all grub does is hand off the boot process to the windows booter, and it proceeds "normally" for windows. The advantage of doing things this way is should you decide you don't like linux, then you put the XP CD in the computer, boot with it, get to repair mode, and do "fixboot /mbr" or something like that (google again) and it restores the windows bootloader to the MBR without a reinstall.

Peace,
JimBass

The procedure is well-documented. I have not tried it, but the principle is straightforward.

First, you make a copy of GRUB that points to the correct partition in you Linux setup. Then you install this in the Windows directory and make an entry in boot.ini to point to it.

Search here or on Google for something like: "boot linux using Windows boot.ini"

Also, search here for Saikee and look in his sig for relevant stuff.

Works fine - there's no need for any other software.

Basically, just
1) install grub to the root partition, not the MBR
2) copy the boot sector record (the first sector) off to a shared partition/USBkey/floppy
3) copy it to Windoze system partition
4) update boot.ini

I *highly* recommend grub - if you use lilo you have to repeat 2) and 3) every time you run the lilo command. Serious PITA.

It should perhaps be mentioned that Vista is (surprisingly) even easier.
Go get easyBCD, and you don't even have to do the copy - it'll find Linux install(s) and build the (Vista) boot entries for you.

Of course, I still prefer grub as my loader - but it is do-able.

I never had any problems using ntldr for both windows and linux.

Hmmm---look at this thread:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=545900
It seems that OP was answering this question?????

Sometime you have little choice: My Gateway laptop boots a "MiniNT" that verifies the MBR and barfs when it doesnt't find the Windows loader. When it finds it, it transfers control to the ntloader on "C:" which, of course, must also be there.

When I first got the laptop, I thought I'd just deactivate hda2 (where the MiniNT lives) but, if I recall correctly, the BIOS continued to boot to hda2 even after it was no longer the active partition.

Since,at that time, I had one application that needed XP, it was easier to just split the drive and let XP have some and Fedora the rest.

One of these days I may see what if I can do better, but with fuse and the ntfs-3g driver, the XP formatted part of the drive is available from, and usable by, Fedora. In fact, I keep a lot of text file on the XP partition in an XP compressed directory. That saves some space, and I don't need to do an explicit tar before accessing a file.

Oh, note the comment about ntfs-3g. I you install that driver, your NTFS drives can be accessed with rw permission from your Linux system. So, for example, you can directly write the GRUB boot sector image to a file on the XP C: drive. No floppy, usb drive, etc., needed.

On the other side, there is an ext2fsd driver available that you can use to access ext2 or ext3 file systems from an XP system. (There is, as far as I know, no support for access to Logical Volumes from the XP side.)

Thank you all for your response. But volhu had the answer by using bootpart. It did what I needed to do.