Mounting Windows Partition and Configuring Bootloader
 

Hi,
I have two questions that I would like to ask you guys. 1st one is, is it possible to mount a windows partition in Linspire? When it installed, Windows XP drive was not mounted. Also, is it possible to set the default OS from Linspire to Windows (for the bootloader)?

Thank you and any help would be appreciated.

I don't know which bootloader linspire uses, but edit your lilo.conf or your grub.conf

As for the partition, man mount and man fstab should solve that.

Those were short answers, but there is lots of documentation on both lilo and grub that is well worth learning.

For mounting partitions, "mount" is for a one time mount, but "fstab" is a table where you can make it automount every time on bootup. NTFS partitions (Windows NT/2K/XP) can only be mounted "read only" unless you install a crazy deal called "captive ntfs", but be careful, I recently ate an NTFS partition using it.

Linspire currently uses LiLo as a boot loader.

Linspire will normally automatically detect all IDE (and SCSI) drives it sees on installation.

That is to say all drives that are connected to the Primary master (hda) and Slave (hdb), and Secondary Master (hdc) and Slave (hdd) ribbon cables.

If you subsequently add a drive, you can get the OS to recognise it by selecting "Redetect" from the start-up menu LiLo posts for some 15 seconds or so after the PC has done its own startup procedure through the BIOS.

This has worked for me with several versions of Lindows and Linspire 4.5 in several different hardware configurations.

That suggests to me that maybe the WindowsXP drive may not be IDE or SCSI. Maybe you need to give us more information?

Certainly Linspire will detect all known Intel PC type file systems... FAT-16, FAT-32, NTFS, Ext-2, Ext-3, ReiserFS, although in saying that, I'm not sure about HPFS which was IBM's file system for OS/2 which carried forward into NT 3.

Linux is not yet equipped with a working write feature for NTFS, so NTFS drives are mounted read-only generally.

It is important, therefore, if you dual boot any Linux with a MS Windows OS on an NTFS partition, that you create an extra regular FAT-32 partition as well. This is so that you can copy files backwards and forwards between the two OS's.

Are you sure the windows partition is not mounted? Pherhaps it is mounted where you don't expect it. You can see what is mounted and where by typing "mount"



If it isn't listed in /etc/fstab you can try adding this there:


/dev/hda1 /mnt/win ntfs defaults 0 2



You should replace "/dev/hda1" with the windows partion if that is nessesary. If the /mnt/win directory doesn't exist you should create it:

mkdir /mnt/win



You can then mount the partition by doing:

mount /mnt/win



In this example it will mount /dev/hda1 on /mnt/win. The ntfs part says to mount it should mount a ntfs filesystem. Defaults says it should use the default settings this filesystem uses. The 2 says this partition should be checked for errors, when the system has been shutdown improperly, after checking the partition that has the 1 on that place in /etc/fstab. (This is propably the partition where / is on)
This all is the same for everyting in /etc/fstab, you should only replace these things if you are using different filesystems and partitions.


To boot Windows as default you should add the word that is behind "label=" in your windows section in /etc/lilo.conf behind "default=" in the same "/etc/lilo.conf"
The word is now something like "lindows" so it should be replaced by the word you can find behind "label=" in the windows section.

After changing this you will have to run "lilo". If you set it up correctly you should propably not get errors.

More information about /etc/fstab can also be found at:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handboo...ok_part1_chap8

and for lilo:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handboo...k_part1_chap10

Thanks so much for your lengthy reply, they worked fabulously.