Hi All,

I have Red Hat 9 installed on my /dev/hda (/dev/hda1 = /boot, /dev/hda2 = / and /dev/hda3 = swap), use Grub as the bootloader.

I put a second hd in the machine and it nicely shows up. Created a partition on it and want to put Win-XP on it. The XP installation complains that it wants to do something with the first partition on hda and that it doesn't have a supported filesystem.

I'm pretty sure that if I would change the first partition to fat32 the XP install would succeed but would leave my RedHat broken....

Can anybody give me a step-by-step on how to do this? I'm scared I'll mess up the whole thing. Something like creating a linux bootimage, use the XP bootloader, put the linux bootimage in the windows partition and add it to boot.ini or something like that (I'm just babbling...)?

Thanks!

XP rights to your MBR on your primary IDE master. It will not see the linux partition. If you make a dos boot floppy with fdisk on it, boot to it, type "fdisk /mbr" and reboot with your XP cd inserted. Boot to the cd and install.

It should only see the available fat32/ntfs5.1 partition and the newly dos formatted mbr. If not, then you may want to read through the multiboot docs on the linux documentation project for more guidance. If so, then install normally, reboot. Complete the install. Then boot to a linux rescue disk or boot disk and rerun GRUB. It should autocreate the WinXP entry. Then reboot. Let me know if there are more issues. Good luck.

you could also make a linux boot disk, install XP as normal,
boot into linux with the boot floopy, edit your gurb.conf
to include the windows drive, and then do grub-install /dev/hda

or

install windows as normal
put in the redhat disk select the UPGRADE option
then choose to upgrade Boot Loader
select grub, and install it to the MBR
it should see the windows disk.