hi guys, i have a little problem and i hope that someone here can help me a bit. first of, i did quite extensive search both an the fora here and on google, however, i didn't find a solution to my problem.

i have to work with a very specific statistical tool, that only runs under windows so i have to set up a dual boot system. nothing too special about this.

however, i have installed my mandrake 10 ce in /dev/hda and plan to install xp on /dev/hdb, my second hard disk. everything i found about dual booting is setting it up when xp existed and the linux distribution will be installed later on. my problem is just the other way round. since i guess that when installing xp it will automatically overwrite the master boot record i'm not sure how to edit my lilo.conf in order to set up a working dual boot. did anybody had to set up a system like this? any help is greatly appreciated...

After installing XP, boot your system with Disc 1 of the Mandrake distribution cds. Get into rescue mode. You should find an option to reinstall lilo on the MBR.

thanks for the very quick anwer ppuru. i hope it works that way, will try it out

hm, one more question just arose. when i try to boot xp it says that some files (i guess the mbr things) have to be written to /dev/hda and since i have 3 linux compatible partitions on /hda, xp obviously can't write anything to my first hard disk.

should i create a little win compatible partition on /dev/hda or is there a known workaround to this problem?

Do you have XP installed already? If so, 'C:' is assigned to hdb1. When you create a Win-partition on hda this will be 'C:', hdb1 is 'D:' This will require a reinstall of Windows. (Really smart, isn't it?...)
Maybe you could try this instead: When you want to boot Windows, enter BIOS setup and change disk 1 to "not installed". Now XP recognizes hdb as the first disk, and puts what it needs in C:
Not all BIOS's boot from a slave, you might have to put that disk on secondary master. Check your booting-options in BIOS first.
No guarantees, but I do believe it should work. If not, I don't think it should ruin anything? Well, it's on your own risk anyway...

hello pingu, thanks for your replay. i have not installed xp already, that's the fucking problem...

i thought at the way you described (disabling hda,...) already, however my motherboard is pretty old and that won't work unfortunately...

hm... *me keeps thinking*

In that case you can safely create a 'C:\' partition on hda.
Make it the very first partition, now I don't know this but I do believe you'll get problems if the first partition is linux... Microsoft doesn't like penguins, you know...
Of course, you could always try, I could be wrong - must happen some day, right?

What I always do:

Unplug the linux drive from the controller and put the drive intended for Windows on the first plug (set the jumpers to be master for this). Install Windows. Pull the drive off the plug and replace your Linux drive to its rightful place as first in line. Put your jumpers back to slave on the Windows drive (where it should be!) and put it back on the second plug of the controller. Boot back to Linux and add the Windows drive (partition) to your /etc/lilo.conf or /boot/grub/menu.lst. You will have your dual boot with Windows second and Linux first. You will have no bootloader problems and you also have the benefit of being able to use either OS independantly of the other this way too (eg: pull one drive and run the other alone).

The only thing you'll need to do to your bootloader config file is to "fool" windows into thinking its still on the first drive. So, for /etc/lilo.confand /boot/grub/menu.lstshould work. Good luck.