Dualbooting Slack/XP
 

GRRRR.... Just installed slack last night. I have a windows partition on this mechine which is used by my parents. I don't think slack detected or mounted the NTFS partition. How do I mount that partition at the boot time and add an entry to lilo.conf for windows XP which is on hda1. I know how to add for fat partitions, but not sure cauz this is a ntfs partition.

btw, is there any way to restore lilo on mbr without having to reinstll the distro, if it was overwritten by windows, because I'm going to have to reformat my windows partition (as usual every few months).

Here's one line from my fstab file, take this as reference :

/dev/hda1 /mnt/winxp ntfs ro,umask=0222,gid=wheel 0 0

Hope this helps !

Ya I think that'll work. This look like normal line from a fstab file. But can't figure out what does this do "gid=wheel". I found some examples by google too. But never seen that line.

When I had mandrake before, it was crazy. It had some lines of scripts about supermount and some weard stuff.

gid stands for GROUPID.

About your lilo conf if i dont remember wrong ( soz i use grub since some time ) you should add this to boot into your XP system

label="xx"
root=/dev/hda1
table=/dev/hda

I mount my windows xp partition with:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs auto,ro,umask=000 0 0

Don't know how this differs from the above in functionality though.

If the mbr overwritten by xp, you can try to boot with slack installation disk, read the instruction, pass the argument at boot promt as shown on the screen, after that u can edit ur lilo ( if there's any changes) and then /sbin/lilo.
Hope this works !!

Alright everyone, thanks for replying. As of now, I dont think windows overwriting mbr would be a matter cauz, at this point the whole (windows) system is down (as usual). So I'm going have to install windows before Slack to make sure that I won't run into other problems :)

yes very importznt to do it in this order and don't forget t put your windows in the first paartition of your first HDD

GL :)

You do not need to reinstall Slack after reinstalling windows. See thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=167720

I got it working :) :) :) I just installed slack added "/dev/hda1/ /mnt/win-c ntfs auto, umask=000 0 0" to fstab and added
label = "WinXP"
table = /dev/hda
root = /dev/hda1
to lilo.conf. It worked. Thanks everyone who helped me with this :) :) ;)

quick question. im also installing slack, but my linux partition comes before the ntfs partition. slack install doesnt recognize the ntfs and how do i know which /dev/hda the ntfs partition is?

my hard drive is formatted
linux ext2
linux swap
c: NTFS partition (win xp)
d: FAT32 partition

fdisk -l /dev/hda

will list all /dev/hdaX

try this in your lilo.conf

other=/dev/hda1
label=winxp
table=/dev/hda

to install lilo again... just type liloconf or liloconfig
or boot with the install cd until your login as root:
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt #assuming your hda1 is /
then type liloconfig

If your hard drive is in that order, I guess your ntfs partition is hda3. I could be wrong here, this is just a guess. Run cfdisk and look at your partition table.