Fedora Core 2 and Windows xp

[Daniel Stonier]

Grub's a pretty nifty little program. To give you an idea of how it works  
with the MBR and boot sectors, here's what I have

hda (Primary Drive)
   hda1 WinXP (whatever program it uses is at the start of partition hda1)
   hda2 FC1 (Grub loaded into MBR of hda)
   hda5 Gentoo (Grub loaded into partition hda5)

hdb (Slave Drive - no OS's)

sda (External USB Drive)
   sda1 Suse 9.1 (Grub loaded into partition hda1)

Currently I have BIOS booting up from hda - my primary drive. The first  
thing it does is look up the MBR
there and subsequently finds FC1's Grub, which then points to and can  
chainload WinXP, Gentoo and Suse.
Note that by chainloading it just runs whatever boot program is at the  
start of each of those partitions.

One option I'm yet to have a fiddle with is to set Suse 9.1 to work with  
FC1's grub directly (no chainloading)
and push Suse's Grub into the MBR of sda (the usb drive). Then if the usb  
drive
has priority in the BIOS, it should boot straight up into Suse's Grub,  
while if hda has the priority in bios it will
boot into FC1's grub.

Hopefully with that I'll be able to run off and plug'n play my usb drive  
into most usb bootable computers
as well as link it in with my computer at home with little hassle.

Dont know if that will clear up whatever issues you have, but its always  
good to know what you can
actually do - sometimes that picture can be a little hazy behind all the  
man pages! btw, none of it needs
any actual removal of your devices. Just some juggling of the bios. Make  
sure you have a boot/rescue
disk handy too if you get into trouble.

Cheers,
Daniel.



On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 11:19:21 +0200, Sylvain Raybaud <sraybaud at free.fr>  
wrote:

> I also have GRUB has a bootloader for FC2 and Xp, and both work fine,  
> but I couldn't get Xp work if I installed FC2 with my Xp disk plugged  
> in.  The easiest (because only) way I found to have multiboot working is  
> to install the OS on 2 separate disks, then to plug in both of them,  
> with Linux master and to configure GRUB manually (with mapping and  
> chainloading).
> I also was said that you can first install Xp on a master disk, then  
> install FC2 on the slave and let anaconda configure grub for you, and it  
> seems to work fine, but I never did it myself.  And I definitly don't  
> like the idea to have Linux on slave while Xp is on master ;)
>
>> On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 06:45:21PM +0200, Mikael Konttinen wrote:
>>> Ori,
>>>
>>> No, I believe that is because you have overwritten the MBR (Master Boot
>>> Record) with GRUB, something that Windows XP cannot handle as it needs  
>>> its
>>> own (NT) bootloader.
>>>
>> I've got GRUB in my MBR and can still boot Windows XP. I just
>> chainload my XP partition from GRUB. Windows doesn't need a
>> special bootloader (although it's glad to wipe out GRUB whenever
>> it gets a chance).
>>
>>
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>
>



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