Windows 2000 dualboot

meridius10 · 02-10-2011, 07:08 AM

Has anyone managed to do a dual boot with W2K and a linux system without a resulting blue screen of death on the Windows partition?

What I mean is only W2K and Linux, not one with XP.

I think there is a difference in the bootloaders of XP and W2K...

schneidz · 02-10-2011, 08:40 AM

i had win-2k and rh-9 playing together nicely years ago.

i think the normal rules still apply... you would install windows first and then install linux and have grub in the mbr so that it could chainload to windows.

yancek · 02-10-2011, 08:57 AM

I also had W2K with Suse Linux 9.2 on the same drive for years. Should not be a problem. W2K and xp both use the same boot files, ntldr, ntdetect, boot.ini...etc. Sounds like you may have overwritten the W2K files when you installed Linux? Are you using Ubuntu? You could try mounting your W2K partition from Ubuntu or whatever Linux distribution you have to see if the W2K boot files are there. Grub doesn't boot windows, it chainloads so all the windows boot files need to be there.

meridius10 · 02-10-2011, 04:45 PM

schneidz - I tried dual booting with Ubuntu (versions 8.04, 9.10 and 10.10) and putting grub on the mbr. Didn't like it there on W2K with a BSOD, but no problem with XP.

yancek - Relating to this, where do you suggest I install GRUB? The mbr didn't work, so should I install it to the Linux partition or Windows one?
When there is a problem, I get out my W98SE disk and do a

Code:

fdisk/ mbr

cmd to reinstall the bootloader, but I can't afford an error with this as I've got loads of programs on W2K.