I want to dual boot linux and windows (something new, eh?). Here's my planned setup.

2 HD's. 1 small one with windows on it. 1 40gb drive split in half that is going to be shared by windows and linux.

Then, I want to install Lilo to a floppy disk. Without the floppy in the computer, windows will boot. With the floppy in the computer, I want Lilo to boot allowing me to choose Linux.


Sound possible?

Godamighty, don't do it!

I'm telling you I've had no end of misery trying to install Windows on more then one partition. I know Linux does it without even thinking about. I read a book on Windows from O'Reilly that actually suggested that there might be some performance improvements by spreading Windows over partitions, but I never saw them.

The problem is that Windows uses a very tight installation procedure, but it remains that there is more then one way to install software in Windows. You will wind up finding software and files all over the place. This was Windows 98SE, but I doubt XP is any different.

And I won't even start talking about what you have to go through to keep track of Linux partitions and drives to make sure everything boots up OK or installs right the first time. Put both problems together and you got some real work ahead of you.

You are pretty sharp to imagine such a thing is possible and you may do it anyway. Just know that you won't be the first to get some good experience the hard way.

If you keep the two operating systems on seperate hard drives, you will probably have better luck. You are also probably better off with LILO on the floppy and Windows booting up from the HD. And, you should also understand the difference between the primary and secondary hard drives.

If you want to boot lilo from a floppy you can.
To make a floppy lilo that was completely different from my hard drive lilo:
# From your '/boot' copy either of: boot-menu.b, boot-text.b, or etc. to the floppy
# A copy of your lilo.conf to the floppy (make any corrections)
# Run '/sbin/lilo -C /yourfloppymntpoint/lilo.conf
I changed the boot and map settings to point to the floppy instead of the hard drive in lilo.conf. Any other corrections suggested by checking 'man lilo.conf'

Perhaps you wish to avoid any problems booting into Windows. I believe installing a boot manager and losing access to Windows is not the norm, but it apparently does happen.

Consider:
You have made your "rescue floppy" when you installed Linux. You boot into Windows by starting your computer normally. You boot into Linux by starting with the boot floppy.
You next take the step you have suggested of making a boot floppy with lilo. At any time you are able to boot by the above 2 methods. Besides making it able to boot Linux, make it able to boot Windows.
When you have succeded in having your boot floppy boot both Linux and Windows, and you feel comfortable with it, attempt to add lilo to the MBR. At any point your floppy will work as it always did.

Normally you do not need to be this careful, but I have seen people not be able to access Windows and it is not totally unwise to be careful.

If you can post your /etc/lilo.conf and how your Linux and Windows are set up I am sure someone can give you the necessary corrections to lilo.conf

Good Luck

i have two OS on 1 HD and i have had no problems so far. So it isn't really necesary to have them on seperate hard drives.

I hope i fully understand what you meant SparceMatrix. If not, sorry then

littlewhitedog.com wrote an article a while back about dual booting. this article is good becuase he tells how to install win/linux and still use the Windows boot loader. check it out. although the article was written for Win2000/Linux, it's exactly the same with WinXP.

http://www.littlewhitedog.com/reviews_other_00011.asp

Right. No, the problem is when you start spreading the installation of two operating systems on one hard drive to another hard drive. If you have one hard drive with two different operating systems installed, that's pretty basic. But if you add another hard drive to a previously installed Windows system on that dual booting HD That's when things start getting complicated. Linux may never know that hard drive is there, but when Windows recognizes that new drive, it rearranges all the other drives you had on there. This has consequences that are difficult to keep track of. It gets even worse if you try to imitate the multiple partition that you see in the dual booted Linux installation. Do you follow? Linux typically installs over several partitions. If you try to install Windows on several Windows partitions and distribute the various files over those partitions, you can have a real mess. I've tried this and I would not recommend it. Just adding another hard drive to Windows may or may not be as nearly as complicated as my attempted partition scheme.

Adding hard drives to Linux has similar potential hurdles to confront. Hard drives are not Plug'nPlay like most of the rest of the hardware is in Linux. You have to make changes to /etc/fstab/ to get the hard drive to mount regularly like the rest of your partitions. You can mount it manually, of course using the "mount" command.

I have a similar hard drive project where I took an old dual booted hard drive and added it to a Linux only installation. What I wanted to do was mount the old Windows vfat partition and use it as a Samba share so that my Windows XP machine could 'talk' to the Linux machine and save files to it which is the basic mission of Samba. Everything was fine, I made the correct changes to /etc/fstab/, but I found that I could not make permissions changes to Linux mounted vfat partition. (Yes, you can mount Windows files in Linux). It took some rather esoteric advice to solve the problem that I found at this forum here:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=45848

Part of the appeal of Linux is that it is free and this is an open invitation for the very resourceful to scrounge up those old 2, 4, and 10 Gig hard drives and try to get something going with Linux and/or Windows on them. I been there. But it gets weird, so be careful unless you are not afraid of work.