dual boot, 2 discs, floppy boot?

pfmrof · 11-06-2005, 09:02 PM

I am running XP, and want to try a Linux distro on a slave drive.
I did a search and found I can leave XP mbr alone and have the Linux on the slave disc boot from a floppy when I want to use it.
My question is can the slave drive be formatted so Linux is on one partition and I can use the other for file storage or whatever and still have the floppy boot the Linux O S?
I did try installing mepis on the slave last week and let the grub load, and lost access to XP, so I had to do a clean install, pain in the neck.

alien3456 · 11-06-2005, 10:21 PM

Today when I installed Slackware, it gave me the option to make a floppy disk with the boot data. At first I didn't know this; I thought I was making an emergency floppy. But if I don't boot with the floppy in my computer now, it will start with the old MBR data, being another linux distro. Very cool feature.

So I know Slackware gives you the option to do this. But I'm very new to linux, and I don't know how many other distros let you do the same.