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| Thread ID: 66865 | 2006-03-09 08:09:00 | Linux - Doze - Dual Booting questions | personthingy (1670) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 436927 | 2006-03-09 08:09:00 | I've been given permission to set my friends machine up as a dual boot. It has a seemingly unused patition of over a GB at the beggining of the primary master HDD, then the XP partition, then an unused 17GB partition that will be a good place for the *nix install, i think. It also has a bran new unused 200GB HDD on the primary slave. I've checked the machine out with Mepis which of course will run as a live CD, and it loves it, so i'm ready to go, except......... First question... Will grub see the XP installation, and automaticly sort out the dual boot options, or is there more to it than that? Second question.. As XP doesn't seem to see reiserfs or ext3, and Linux cant write to NTFS, am i stuck with using partitions with fat32 for the data we will wish to share between the 2 operating systems on the new 200GB drive? Will there be any problems associated with this? Third question(s) Any words of warning before i go into dual boot land, which is something i've never done before |
personthingy (1670) | ||
| 436928 | 2006-03-09 08:24:00 | Forth semi related Question..... My new mini hip flask drive, (being the HDD from my dead flaptop hung from a USB cable) seems all but invisable to XP... Am i to be forced to reformat a partition as FAT32 on that if i want to carry round data that can be read and written to by a XP machine as well as my own Linux machine??? |
personthingy (1670) | ||
| 436929 | 2006-03-09 08:27:00 | There shouldn't be any problems at all, and GRUB will see the XP installation and add it to the grub.conf automatically. Most go on to let you select which OS is to be the default as well (not sure if Mepis does). You can read/write to NTFS but it is not recommended. Best thing is to have the shared partition formatted as FAT32. It is seamless sharing files between the two OSs that way. My slave drive has been left formatted as FAT32 even though I don't run Windows anymore. The only thing to watch out for, is the possibility XP is rendered unbootable and you might have to repair the MBR to access it again. |
Jen (38) | ||
| 436930 | 2006-03-09 19:41:00 | And one final question... Swap files... Any particualar format for these? I cant remember what (if anything) windows likes, and when i'm setting up /swap for *nix its set up as "linux-swap" partition. Can i let XP use that or not? |
personthingy (1670) | ||
| 436931 | 2006-03-10 00:23:00 | Be a bit careful with that "seemingly unused" partition of nearly 1 GB. Have a look at it with CFDISK. If it's "Type 12", don't do anything to it. It'll be a Compaq/HP BIOS/maintenance partition. (It does seems a bit big for that ... it might be a Windows restoration partotion). A swap "disk" doesn't use a real file system. I think mkswap just writes sector headers, and maybe a primitive FAT style allocation map. Xp could use it. But Xp would need to format it, and then you would need to set it up as a swap disk again. It's not worth the trouble. |
Graham L (2) | ||
| 436932 | 2006-03-10 00:27:00 | Make sure you have a backup of the windows drive before you do any thing ** just in case ;) ** | stu161204 (123) | ||
| 436933 | 2006-03-10 05:12:00 | All done . . . i can know use my friends computer while house sitting without having to use windows . . . Ahhh much better . *nix is on hda5, hda6, and hda7 (swap, /, /home) windows is on hda2, hda1 is something i decided i didn't want to know about Hdb2, and hdb3 are shared spaces, with hdb1 being a reserved buffer space for things like the DVD burner rather than a swap file space as such . It works well, and no data was lost, nor were any animal killed in the making of the adds . . . . The only bit i'd like to tweak, is how to get grub to boot windows after a 15sec wait, or something along those lines . At the moment it boots up grub, and sits there offering: --Mepis linux (and a whole heap of version numbers) --Windows on HDA2 --Memtest The girls will complain less if "thier" computer doesn't have anything weird and new on it - that they notice :D thanks to all for your help so far!!!!!!!! |
personthingy (1670) | ||
| 436934 | 2006-03-10 06:28:00 | There should be a setting in grub.conf saying something like this: Timeout=30 30 is the amount of seconds that grub will wait before booting to the highlighted O/S Change it to whatever you want, 10 seconds sounds good initially In Gentoo, grub.conf sits in /boot/grub. May be the same with your distro. Change it as root |
Myth (110) | ||
| 436935 | 2006-03-10 07:07:00 | menu.lst ????? i cant find grub.conf timeout 15 color cyan/blue white/blue foreground ffffff background 2f5178 gfxmenu /boot/grub/message title MEPIS at hda2, kernel 2.6 kernel (hd0,2)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-586tsc root=/dev/hda2 nomce psmouse.proto=imps splash=verbose vga=791 initrd (hd0,2)/boot/initrd.img-2.6.12-586tsc title MEPIS at hda2, kernel 2.4 kernel (hd0,2)/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.29 root=/dev/hda2 nomce quiet splash=verbose vga=791 hdb=ide-scsi initrd (hd0,2)/boot/initrd.splash title Run MEMTEST to test system memory kernel /boot/memtest86.bin Trouble is this seems to mean time out and boot MEPIS, but i need it to time out and boot 'doze if everyone is to stay happy... |
personthingy (1670) | ||
| 436936 | 2006-03-12 02:04:00 | That file doesn't have an entry for Windows. That gfxmenu /boot/grub/message looks suspicious. Have a look at that file in /boot/grub . | Graham L (2) | ||
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