winxp pro and redhat. help with boot manager.

[tnall]

i have winxp pro installed on my lap top. as well.
i then created a new 5 gig partition for redhat 8.0
and then 5oo megs for swap(doubling my ram memory).

i did not select to install lilo or grub during the redhat
install. the install went great, but now i can't figure out how to setup winxp bootmanger to point to the new partition.

my laptop has a single hard drive.

partition magic reports the following,
\\.\disk1.part2
linux swap is located at
1st physical Cyl 4812,hd 1,sect 1
last physical Cyl 4863,hd 254,sect 63

main linux "/" partition
type 0f- extended.
cyl 4099,hd 0,sect 1
cyl 4863,hd 254,sect 63

my boot config file has this in it.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
C:\ = "Microsoft Windows"


what do i need to point winxp to select my installed redhat
partition ?


thanks

troy nall

 

[wolluf]

For XP boot loader to boot lini=ux, you need a copy of the linux boot partition created as a file and a reference to this file in boot.ini - eg,

C:\bootsect.lnx="Red Hat Linux".

(Note C:\="Microsoft Windows" is really C:\bootsect.dos="Microsoft Windows - presume you installed XP with 9x/Me present in the machine?)

But I think Linux needs lilo or Grub (or a bootloader of some sort) installed in the partition its loaded on to have a boot sector (not entirely sure about this - see the boot-us website referenced below for some info about this).

The easiest way for you to dual boot would be to install lilo/grub to the mbr (depending on your expertise/linux distibution you may need to reinstall Linux to do this) - it will detect XP and offer XP/Linux dual boot. Or you could install it to the Linux partition, and find a tool to extract it to file (pretty sure Google will turn one up - it did when I had a quick look at this some months back). Or install it to Linux partition, and use a third party boot manager (my preference is

http://www.boot-us.com).

 

[bofhrevenge2]

The easiest way with Redhat is to install XP first then select to install the Grub boot loader when installing Red Hat the next time you boot Grub will give you the option of Windown or Red at.

Easy as pie that way.

 

[Chrispr]

If you have had half as much trouble trying to get the linux bootloader to "automatically" detect the DOS selection below Redhat 8 as windows XP when it boots up, it won't work for you, at least it hasn't for me. It does pick up windows XP as another operating system, but I had to go in manually and edit the grub.conf file to have the DOS point to the windows partition. I agree, trying to get the windows bootloader to load redhat is much more difficult (Imho) than getting linux to load windows XP. I am going to put together an FAQ on the subject of dual booting linux and windows as it seems to be a popular subject, it will take me a few days though.

grub.conf should look something like this if you are looking to use the Linux bootloader:

#boot=/dev/hda2
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.7-10)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.7-10 ro root=/dev/hda3 hdc=ide- scsi
initrd /initrd-2.4.7-10.img
title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1


Regards,