Dual booting Linux & XP
 

I have Linux and XP installed right now, however I didn't do the installations quite right and switching between the two is a pain as my boot loader does not work. I am going to reformat my drive and repartition it. However, as I don't use Linux that often and I will probably change it often to try out different distros, I'd rather not use LILO or GRUB to boot my comp. Can someone walk me through creating a boot partition and properly installing windows XP and red hat 9 so that the XP boot loader will be able to boot both linux and xp? Thanks in advance!

It's impossible. XP boot loader will only Boot Windows. "One OS to rule them all..." applies here. What you could do is to create a Linux boot disk and every time you want to boot into Linux, you place the boot disk and there you go :). During Redhat's install, you can create such a disk. Simply say NO when it's time to install grub.

Since you are not going to use Linux often (can't understand why, since its a very superior OS then XP ;)) you might want to use a Live CD rom, like Knoppix or Slackware-Live (now called Slax) instead of installing directly into your HD. You simply place the CD at the CD rom drive and uses Linux... no installation required. There's a noticeable loss of speed, since no CD/DVD-rom is as fast as an HD, but still, it's the best solution for your case ;)

Good Luck!

Damn... well I'd use Linux more often if I wasn't addicted to Final Fantasy XI. I guess I'll just install LILO or GRUB. Which is recommended for my situation? By the way, if it makes a difference, this is all being booted off of a SATA drive.

Grub, since it's Redhat's default :). Do like this, make the partitions, install XP at the first partition, then install Redhat. If you ever get tired of Linux and want to restore XP's boot loader, boot with a win98 boot disk and type at C:\

fdisk /MBR

to clean the boot record. Making partitions is very personal. I usually make two small ones (one for Linux and one for Win2K) and another big one (with FAT32) where I use for both Linux and Windows... installing games, downloading stuff and so on.

Final Fantasy XI heim. Didn't know there was for PC. I've not touched a FF game since IX on PSone :). Unfortunately it won't run on Linux, at least not yet:

http://www.transgaming.com/gamepage.php?gameid=1054

Good luck! :)

Do I need 3 partitions? One for XP, one for Linux and one for grub?

No no, you can do as you please. I do it :). Grub does not need a partition (/boot) it can be "safely" installed at the MBR (master boot record). But you can do if you want :)

Linux asks for 2 partitions though. One for install all the stuff ( called "/" ) and one for swap, called swap :). swap is "said" to be twice the size of your RAM memory. So if you have 128mega of RAM, make a 256 swap. I don't do that, since I've 512 RAM, so I wont' need over a giga of swap (unless you are willing to run a server or something..) so I've a 512 mega swap. You don't "have" to make the swap partition, but it's good to... for sure :)

Dual booting Linux & XP
 

Actually you can use the NT boot loader to load Linux, it's not newbie friendly but it is doable, read about it here.

http://www.users.bigpond.com/pclim/h...dual-boot.html

Personally, on a dual boot system, I don't waste my time with it since Lilo does such a good job detecting OS's......................

I have a dual boot system too (for now). LILO works great for me. :)

I got the same issue I had last time I did this - "NTLDR missing". Any way to fix it? When I installed Red Hat, it gave me a warning saying "do to your architecture, the /boot partition may not be properly configured"

i have a dual boot system, 98se and XP, and i boot linux from a floppy, cause when i had it booting from the MBR, it was wiping out my xp...

I too agree that you can use the XP bootloader to boot Linux, but the XP boot loader kind of sucks because it is very restrictive about what you can do.

The best way to keep out of trouble is to go ahead and use a Linux boot loader (I use Lilo, so I don't know much about grub) but don't install it on the MBR! XP will eventually eat it anyway. Instead let Microsoft have its way with the MBR and install lilo to the Linux partition itself (boot=/dev/hda2 instead of boot=/dev/hda for example). Then using either Linux's fdisk or XP storage manager you simply set the active partition to the Linux partition to use the Linux boot loader (which then has options to boot back to XP anyway). Then if anything goes wrong, like you re-install either OS, you can simply change the active partition back to XP and XP will boot as if nothing ever happened. The whole setup works really well and I've been doing it that way for years.

As a backup, you might want to configure the XP bootloader to load Linux too, so that if you mess up your Linux boot loader, your can still get in that way instead of resorting to a boot CD or floppy. If I remember you can only specify one additional non-NT/2K/XP OS in the XP boot loader, unless they finally "fixed" that, which I doubt (of course, it would have been fixed long ago if it was open source!)

How can I create a Linux Boot Disk ? I want to boot into my linux via a floppy and see if it works at first place?
Thanks

I use a triple boot system because "war of the worlds" and "multiquence"
only run on Windows ME but I have to use XP for work and I am trying to learn RH9. I have had many problems such as "NTLDR missing" and failed
installations but everything is running well now. I have done this using two serial ata drives. The only OS that doesn't like them is XP. I split the C drive in two, installed ME on the first partition and left the second empty. Then installed XP on the D drive. Then RH9 on the second partion on C.
When my PC boots, Grub gives me 5 seconds to choose between Windows or Linux. If I choose Windows it loads the XP boot manager and gives me the option to boot into ME or XP.

Sorry, not true.
Do this:

dd if=/dev/hda3 of=bootsect.lin bs=512 count=1

where hda3 is the partition your GNU/Linux boots from.

Then copy bootsect.lin to your Windows boot partition, ie. c:\
Then let it be loaded by XP Bootloader through C:\bootsect.lin="Linux" or something alike.

Chainloading XP through grub is more convenient, though.

Or use this if you want it the easy way: http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm