Hello, everyone.

A friend told me I needed to get my /boot somewhere in the 1st 1024 cylinders of my HD to be able to dual-boot Linux and XP. Without Part. Magic, it took me a year and a day to move the XP partition (which is in NTFS format, so can't move it w/ freeware). But I got it done.

Now I can't boot up XP (or Linux, another post, another time), and I know it's because XP went from being hda1 to hda4.

After reading a bunch of posts, I'm wondering: Did I even need to bother putting /boot in the first 1024 cylinders? So many people have /boot all the way back at hda6 or 7 that I'm wondering if the GRUB install to the MBR is good enough to do the job.

Clue me in. If XP wants to be a big baby about it and just HAS to be hda1, then I'll just reformat the whole stinkin' drive and start from square 1 (assuming I can install XP from my Dell XP re-installation CD).

Thanks.

Older hardware would have required it but most modern hardware would be ok - If you had tried you would have found out and it wouldn't have done any harm

Yeah, when I first went through the RH9 install and had my drive as:

hda1 39 MB BIOS/MBR
hda2 23 GB Win XP
----- 15 GB Free space

I tried to just install RH9 to the free space. But RH freaked out and gave me a prompt telling me something about disk geometry. So I figured my friend was right and went ahead with the crazy partitioning.

RH9 just must be living in the past re: /boot and the 1024 rule. Guess they keep it for older machines, but they should at least mention something.

Thanks.

The warning is still there but it is more or less redundant now.

It was a limitation of much older BIOSes, and also a limitation in early (pre 21.4) versions of lilo, which did not support lba32 mode. For some reason, many people still think it's an issue, but it itsn't. BTW- Grub never had this limitatation.

As for the above-mentioned experience with Redhat 9 and disk geomentry, that's almost certainly not a function of the 1024 cylinder limit, even if it is geometry-related in general.

You might be able to get XP to boot from hda4, some versions of Windows are less picky about where they live than others.

What are you currently using as your bootloader? Post the contents of the bootloader's configuration file.

Using GRUB.

grub.conf looks something like:
title RH9 (2.4.20-8)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-8 ro root=LABEL=/
initrd /initrd-2.4.20-8.img
title XP
rootnoverify (hd0,4)
chainloader +1

my HD looks like:
hda 1 Dell System BIOS (MBR)
hda 2 /boot
hda 3 extended (Linux)
hda 5 swap
hda 6 / {root}
hda 4 Win XP (NTFS)

As things stand, the GRUB comes up fine but can't get me to XP. It takes me to Linux okay, though.

I'll wait to format and fdisk in case somebody has any ideas.
I'm planning on the format, fdisk, then going back to original
config that Win XP liked:
hda 1 Dell BIOS
hda 2 Win XP
----- Free Space

But this time I'll make sure XP is in FAT32 format. Then I'll install RH9 to the free space at the END, not middle, of the partitions.

Appreciate the help. Any more ideas greatly appreciated.

Grub starts it's drive/partition numbering at "0", so if XP is truly on hda4, that line should read:

rootnoverify (hd0,3)

Man alive. Thanks -- didn't even notice that. I had it right for my Linux, but forgot about Win XP.

Changing it now. You saved me an hour of sitting through boring installations. Thanks again.

Now to attack my Linux drivers!

You're welcome; hope that does the trick for you!