i have a dual boot with redhat 7.2 and win XP. i want to prompt for a password whenever a user selects to boot form linux (from dual boot option), but i dont want to ask a password when a user selects to boot from XP.

in other words when a XP user comes he should boot XP normally (without any boot password ) but when a linux user comes he should be asked for a password just after he selects linux from dual boot.

NOTE: enabling bios password would not solve the problem as XP user would also be prompted for it

Any help?

thanks

Lets see if I get this right, your using LILO for the booting and what version of XP do you have, im guess Pro, well you should be able to go for windows :

start
then

settings
then

control panel
then click on

user accounts

then click on your computer admin, and change password and leave it blank.

and for Linux, do you have users set up on it, if so, you should have the ability to add a password to them.

opps, sorry i meant for the part in windows for the password, put the password that you would like to use.

Unless you've done something silly like letting your login manager auto-login a user, everything in linux will already be password protected.

Boot managers don't generally handle things like security.

setting or removing windows password is not the problem.
the problem is to prompt for password at BOOT time.

the scenario is like there is a large windows based network, with mainly windows users, and i want to install linux on my pc which would be used bya small group.

so i dont want other win users to even boot from linux bcz they would restart when its booted. how to set the password

To repeat, I've never seen a bootloader with selective passwords.


so i dont want other win users to even boot from linux bcz they would restart when its booted.
Not making a whole lot of sense there. What's your problem with them restarting when it's booted? if you don't want them to boot into linux by accident, just make windows your default in the boot manager.

i have heard that writing

password="anything"

in start of /etc/lilo.conf

would prompt for password at boot time

any comments?

password=something is for lilo but I don't want to restart my machine to test it and I am using GRUB.

In grub, you can set a password using the grub-md5-crypt. To use this, login as root and then run this:

grub-md5-crypt

You'll get a password prompt here. forx, i specified the password redhat, i get this as an output:

$1$JQQTV/$OK8zwwM5hTFI7m/i6AEl6/

I then copy that in /etc/grub.conf. To set the password just for the linux bootup:

title Red Hat Linux
password --md5 $1$JQQTV/$OK8zwwM5hTFI7m/i6AEl6/
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.18-10 ro root=/dev/hda6
initrd /initrd-2.4.18-10.img

You can also use a plain text password here but I prefer using the crypted one. Just remove the --md5 option and set the entry 'redhat'.

This gives a password prompt everytime a user chooses to boot into Red Hat Linux.

There is a graphical, mouse enabled & password protected (if you want it) boot loader available free on the net. Look up www.xosl.org. Download the small Windows XOSL115.ZIP file & unzip it to a directory of your choice.

Make a bootable DOS disk, then copy the entire contents of the XOSL directory to the disk.

Here's the catch. Xosl can only be installed to a DOS FAT16 or FAT32 partition. I'd suggest making a small dedicated partition at the end of your drive, approx 50Mb to use as a dedicated partition for Xosl. The partition will have to be bootable, so when you format it, copy the Windows 98 system files to it. You'll need to be careful if resizing a Windows XP NTFS partition as this can cause windows to break if it's not done right. The best tool for the job is partition magic, but it's not free & the demo version only manipulates a folder on your HDD without making any real changes.

If you don't have a suitable system to make bootable floppy disks, look for "The Ultimate Boot Disk" on the net. The Win98 version has programs that are much older & it is restricted to hard disks up to 8.4Gb Search for Ranish Partition manager if you want an updated version of the drive partitioning tool used with this disk set.

After booting into DOS from the FDD, type in install & follow the prompts. After a reboot, enter the setup screen to add the various partitions you want to boot, you can even give them a name of your chioce & choose a default boot partition. The result is a clean, password protected graphical boot manager that can & will sit in front of any OS you choose. I have heard it can boot from any partition on any drive connected to the IDE bus as well, but I haven't tried that yet.

Try it, you'll be highly impressed, I was & I'm an ex-reseller.