Winblow$ XP & Red Hat dual boot

[GNU_man]

Hello, I am using RH9 right now but it's aged and given me so much grief lately I may have to take this old dog out back and shoot it. I am thinking of switching to CentOS. However, my concern with RedHat ( 9 excluded) is that it will sodomize my boot sector ala Fedora Core 2/3

I CAN NOT risk this!! If i lose Windows (the data on in it) I will die!

Does anyone know how well CentOS handles dual boot systems?

[drakebasher]

Does anyone know how well CentOS handles dual boot systems?

If you are that concerned about screwing your Windows, you might consider booting Linux from a floppy. Install the OS but with no bootloader, Use a Grub boot floppy to boot the new system, do some configuration and then run Grub's 'setup' to make the floppy point to your Linux. It's a few steps of extra work, but perfectly safe.



p.s.: cool username!

[Jon Snow]

Hello, I am using RH9 right now but it's aged and given me so much grief lately I may have to take this old dog out back and shoot it. I am thinking of switching to CentOS. However, my concern with RedHat ( 9 excluded) is that it will sodomize my boot sector ala Fedora Core 2/3

I CAN NOT risk this!! If i lose Windows (the data on in it) I will die!

Does anyone know how well CentOS handles dual boot systems?

I don't know CentOs but I have Fedora Core 3 and Win XP on my computer. To run Fedora you need to intall a boot loader (grub or LILO) in the MBR. This should not cause any problems. On my computer grub lists Win XP as "Other" on boot. Just move the cursor down to Other and hit Enter. Win should boot.

[GNU_man]

Did you not hear about the big issue with FC2? There we so many people who were hit by it.
Then soon after some people posted a fix for it and explained why it happened. Then when
FC3 was released everyone assumed this was the first thing they fixed by to everyone's astonishment they left that nefarious boot bug unfixed!

Check out this article:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4896

Frankly - i am sick of Red Hat. They are becoming another Micro$oft anyway. I am just waiting for the stable/final release of Debian Sarge, and then i'm going to blast this RH9 installation and switch to the true-GNU disto of Linux!

[Jon Snow]

No, I hadn't heard. I have encountered some problems with grub in the past, which led me to using lilo until recently. My distribution of choice has been Mandrake for some time, anyway, and it prefers lilo. I haven't used Red Hat / Fedora since RH7.3 except for test installs. Right now I have Debian Sarge, Fedora Core 3, and Win XP on my desktop computer at home. Both Debian and Fedora are recent installs. I have installed grub from both of them, and it has always worked fine.

There isn't really a reason to wait for Sarge to be declared stable. It works fine. Ubuntu is a reasonable alternative. If you want to stay in the rpm world you should have a look at Mandriva (as Mandrake calls itself now).

[GNU_man]

Speaking of Sarge, i was under the impression that it's still in the testing stages, if you are using it though, how well is it running? What version of GNOME does it come with?

I also use Mandrake/driva whatever they want to call it now, on my laptop. LILO works like a
charm, no complaints so far.

sidenote:
One of the many obnoxious qualities (or should i say LACK of quality) about WinDOS is that
it overwrites your mbr without even so much as a warning! Obviously, M$ never conceived
of the idea than anyone would use their PC to run anything else. My laptop is a dual boot Mandrake 9.2 + WinDOS 98. But LILO will alow you to reinstall iitself using your Boot CD-ROM after this has happened!

[/quote]

[Jon Snow]

Well, Debian's standard for a "stable" release is apparently higher than those of other distros. They maintain three branches, namely "stable", "testing", and "unstable". There hasn't been a new stable for three years, so even the (current) unstable release should be fairly mature. Sarge comes with gnome 2.8.