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