Hi,
I have been using a Linux only compuer for years now. A couple different distributions. Right now I'm using Debian. I cannot for the life of me get my new MP3 player to work under Linux... it wont mount like a normal USB flash device as my digital camera and USB key do. I've finally given up on it, and I want to install Windows XP on another partition basically just so I can copy files over to the MP3 player. My problem is, I've only heard of people installing Windows XP before they install Linux, and installing it at the beginning of the drive, however, my spare partition (about 3 gigs) is at the end of my drive, I left it there when I partitioned last, just incase something like this happened, and I have installed Linux first. I already have lots of stuff setup on this computer in Linux how I like it, and I'm not really looking forward to fdisking the thing and putting Windows XP on first just so I can have it. I've heard there were difficulties with installing Windows XP as not the first OS on the drive, so I'm asking, what exactly are these difficulties? And how might I get around them?

I have my first partition, a 25MB /boot partition on /dev/hda1 (ext2), a 256MB swap parititon on /dev/hda2, and a ~36GB root parittion on /dev/hda3 (reiser4), and then that blank partition at the end of about 3GB that I'm willing to format as NTFS.

My MP3 player says it ONLY supports Windows XP, so it has to be Windows XP (says it on the box). I thought maybe I could get it to work in Linux, but I cant figure it out, I think I'd have to hack the USB to do it and who knows what else. It's a Philips GoGear 1630/17 if anybody has any ideas on how to get it working under Linux... I've already tried openGoGear by the way, no luck. It does work fine in WinXP though, up until now I've been using my mother's computer to copy files to it.

Thanks,
Marshall

If you use GRUB then the map command is the answer as per my tutorial in signature.

map can be used to trick MS that drive 1 is drive 0 or partition 6 is partition 1 and vice versa


2) if you use partimage you could save an image of MS in its correct drive 0 partition 1 setup and then put it elsewhere.

I can't use grub. For some reason, whenever I do, I get some CRC Error System Halted bullshit when I try to boot... s o I just use Lilo. I've been told it was memory problems, but I sufice to think so. Everything else works fine on the computer, and its stable, etc, the only time it would have trouble is if I tried to use grub. The thing is, it would do the same thing if I used Lilo and put compact (i think?) in /etc/lilo.conf.

Could you recommend a tutorial on using the other method with partimage?

check out the dox at www.partimage.org
k