I am new to linux, been working with it on my mail servers and dns servers and I like it, but I am having some trouble, I wanted to install the new slackware 10.1 onto my home computer to play with but when I install everything from my slackware cd, it wont give me an option to either boot in windows or slackware, it just boots right into windows. If anyone could help explain to me how I can set it up correctly so that I can choose whether to boot in windows, which I most have I have many files in windows that I have to keep hold of, and being able to boot into linux to play around with it as well. My partitions for linux where just 1.5gb swap
6gb root, and 20gb home. Let me know if I am doing anything wrong, ah and the partitions where primary but I did not set them to boot cause I wanna be able to boot in windows as well.

come now some one has to know how I can dual boot xp and slackware.

after all the packages are installed it gives you options on how you want to boot. just install lilo to your mbr (i think it is the third option).


and relax

you need to install a bootloader. it sounds like you didn't do that when you installed. boot into slack using the installation cd...and at the boot prompt, type:

boot: bare.i root=/dev/hdX noinitrd ro
(the X being whatever number partition slack is on)

once slack boots up, open a terminal, such as xterm and as root, type "pkgtool"
this will open the package tool, scoll down to setup, choose that, then scroll to liloconfig and choose that, and follow the instructions...i'm pretty sure the "simple" will add windows to your lilo.config...after you do that, reboot, and it should use the LILO bootloader, where you can choose either linux or windows....

awesome I will try that thanks alot, does this mean I will not need to edit the boot.ini in windows.

you won't need to edit the boot.ini in windows, cause you won't be using that...you'll be using lilo to boot the systems...

yes, at the lilo boot prompt you should be able to choose linux or windohs. if you choose windows lilo will pass control to boot.ini, where if you have multiple windoh installs you can then choose which.

the conventional wisdom is to install all your windohs stuff first and then do linux last. windohs was notorios for wiping out Master Boot Records, xp probably isn't as bad (tho I dont know).

Ya well I guess I am just dumb or something but I found out that when you have a couple of options while installing slackware one of the options that is not recommended is to install boot into MBR or something like that, well if your looking to be able to boot both windows and linux it must be set to install in MBR once you do that the simple setup for lilo makes everything else work just fine, thanks for the help.