I have a dual boot set up to boot to windows by default. I want to be able to switch from within windows to reboot into linux. From linux to be able to choose to reboot to windows.

I had 2 ideas how to do this.

First I tried using grub4dos chainloaded from ntldr using c:\grldr="load grub" in boot.ini and setting the deafault to be the windows partition. in order to shutdown to linux i ran a batch file that rewrote boot.ini "default=" line to read "deafault=c:\grldr" and then reboot the computer. -- It workedto reboot into linux but I cannot write the boot.ini from within linux because then windows is not able to read it. The closest I can do is del the boot.ini file and then it will anyway boot c:\windows. but I want it to default to windowswith a choice for linux.

Second way I thought about (but don't know how to implement) is to use a marker file and the find command of grub. I will still need to use grub4dos so it can read from the ntfs partition. I would writesomething like "default=find /boot/bootthisdrive" in the coorect syntaxwhich I dont even know if it is possible.

Thanks in advance and sorry for the long speech.

Why is this? You haven't described what filesystem windows is using but could it be that you haven't added NTFS support to your Linux distro?

it IS ntfs. I can read from it so I thought it was supporting ntfs. I am running Puppy linux 4.

thanks again and sorry for being a newb

A lot of distros can read NTFS but can't write to them without adding some extra modules.

I understand that the latest release of Puppy can read/write but I've never used it myself.

Take a look at http://puppylinux.org/wiki/how-tos/general/ntfs

See if this answers your question. If not come back to this post and we can try something else.

(Never apologise for being a newbie - in no time you will know stuff that I don't and I will appreciate your advice...)

I actually read that there. It was for an older version. I realised after I was only having problems when I mounted using the terminal to type "mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/hda2" which mounted the drive as type ntfs which I thought was right (it really is). However when I use pmount, Puppy's gui mounting program and then type "mount" in a terminal it says it is mounted as type "fuseblk". I googled around and got an idea of what the difference is except I have no idea how to mount it as that type. if i try -t fuseblk it tells me wrong fs type,bad superblock, etc... other than that I was able to do what I was trying. I installed grub4dos and edit the menu.lst from windows or linux. the only problem is I need to unmount the drive and remount it using pmount in order for the script to be able to write to the drive. I am thinking of converting it to fat partition instead. it is not my windows partition anyway just a partition meant to be shared between linux and windows. (it should have been fat32 to begin with)

sorry for thelong winded reply...

thanks for help.

I just changed the fs to vfat. when i "dmesg | tail" it said it was a dirty drive etc... run chkdsk ... So i just changed it to vfat because it is basically a freshly formatted hard drive and if there was anything wrong it was from rw to ntfs from linux.
Everything works perfectly now. I have an option in the shutdown menu of my WM to reboot to win and an icon on my windows desktop to reboot to linux.

The only problem I have now is to get a good puppy linux icon for the .bat file on xp...