How to facilitate dual boot of Win XP on a Debian machine
 

Hi All,

I am running Deb 5 as a desktop on which I just run firefox and open office. It works great. I need to run windows xp pro in order to run some astronomy software (The Sky X)and I know GRUB can be used to allow a choice of OS at boot. I have googled a bit but mostly I found articles which say install Windows 1st. Does anyone have a step by step guide to setting up a dual boot system from a system which already has debian installed?

This is what I have currently
AMD 64 proc. (3 years old)
2GB RAM
2 SATA HDDs (one with Deb installed, the other for Data)

I also have another HDD (uninstalled in a computer at present) on which I'll install Win XP Pro

Thanks for any help you can give.

All the best
Greeb

If you are installing Windows on a second drive, the order of which you install the OSes (Windows first versus Linux first) won't matter. That is a concern for two or more operating systems on the same drive.

Disconnect the Linux drive (to prevent any possibility of the Windows installer touching the Linux system), install Windows as normal, and then put the Linux drive back in as the master. Then it is just a matter of adding a line in Linux's GRUB configuration to tell it there is a Windows OS on the second drive.

Thanks for this, will give it a try in next few days.

How to amend the config file?
 

Thanks for your help with this.

I have installed XP on the new hard drive and now need to amend the grub config file; here is what I found near the end of the file media:/hdc1/grub/menu.lst


## ## End Default Options ##

title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.26-2-686
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.26-2-686 root=/dev/mapper/debian-root ro quiet
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.26-2-686

title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.26-2-686 (single-user mode)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.26-2-686 root=/dev/mapper/debian-root ro single
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.26-2-686

### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST


could you tell me what to put in to make it offer the windows OS as an option?

Thanks again,
Greeb

Alternatviely, you can press F12 after POST to select your boot device (in your case, Windows hard drive or Linux hard drive)