Adding Windows 2000 into a dual-boot after the fact?

Jeff Vian jvian10 at charter.net
Sat Jan 31 00:25:40 UTC 2004


Darrin wrote:

> Preston Crawford wrote:
>
>> I have a nice, well-running, well behaved Fedora installation. I'm
>> thinking of buying Windows because I need to learn ASP.NET and Mono, for
>> all that it does well, has some shortcomings. Plus there's no good
>> editor for ASP.NET. Anyway, that's the "why would you want to do this"
>> part. As far as how I would do it, I have a second hard drive. I think I
>> can just install the second hard drive with Windows and then point Grub
>> at that drive as a possible boot point. Is that true? Or will Windows
>> want to erase the MBR of HDA and thus this won't be possible at all
>> unless I swap the places of the hard drives and reinstall GRUB onto the
>> new HDA?
>>
>> Either way, I'd like to do this (assuming I even choose to do it) in a
>> fashion that doesn't ruin my Linux install.
>> Preston
>>
>>
> I have heard that Windows will wipe out the boot info for Linux if you
> install Windows on a box that already has Linux installed. 

this can hapen if you install the linux boot loader on the MBR then 
install windows.

>
> For that reason, I've only set up dual boot systems by having the
> Windows OS installed first.

You also can set up the linux install to boot from the first sector of 
the boot partition ( NOT the MBR) and then install windows later.  In 
fact the easiest way to dual boot with XP or 2000 is to do exactly that 
(does not matter which order the install is done), and then follow the 
instructions I found here.
    http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux/grub-w2k-HOWTO.html






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