Mandrake / XP dual boot

[wutever99]

Hey All,

I've heard great things about LINUX and have recently decided to install it on my system to test it out. I have Windows XP installed as my primary OS on a 10 GB HDD (master), and i have a seconday HDD (slave) for all my XP Data. I've installed Mandrake 10.1 on a third 10GB HDD, but when i boot up, it just goes straight to windows. If i remove the HDD containing XP it boots into Mandrake. How can i set up a dual boot between these two systems? Please advise. Thanks

[darklordsatan]

Did you install a bootloader like LILO?? or dont know?

[pupdaleon]

Thats Simple you need to change witch drive it boots from in the bios

[wutever99]

no bootloaders. i simply have one HDD w/ XP, one w/ LINUX... when i put them together, only XP boots. I've heard of using a bootloader like GRUB, LILO and Partition Magic, but wasn't sure which would be the best one to use. Also, i couldn't find any instructions on line that walks me through how to set it up. All the posts i've seen on line in forums are about dual boot w/ both OS on the same drive, so i wasn't sure if the same would apply if the OS were on separate drives. any advice or instructions would be appreciated. Thanks.

[darklordsatan]

I've heard of using a bootloader like GRUB, LILO and Partition Magic

Just as a worthless post o' mine, partition magic is not a boot loader, but a win32 partition manager.

Now, back to your problem, maybe this can work http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/...with-GRUB.html (i.e installing a boot loader, which might solve your problem...)
sorry if it doesnt since I dont have time right now to search better links, ups

[Jay_one]

I've heard great things about LINUX and have recently decided to install it on my system to test it out. I have Windows XP installed as my primary OS on a 10 GB HDD (master), and i have a seconday HDD (slave) for all my XP Data. I've installed Mandrake 10.1 on a third 10GB HDD, but when i boot up, it just goes straight to windows. If i remove the HDD containing XP it boots into Mandrake. How can i set up a dual boot between these two systems? Please advise. Thanks

Hi.

I had many problems with my duel boot (WIN XP SP2 / MANDRAKE 10.1).

I was recieving numerous errors.

In the end i found that if you have /root, swap, /usr and /opt on a partition of your primary drive (maybe only the /root directory, but not too sure) mount /home to your secondary hard drive, and install lilo to the mbr then it works fine and also picks up windows and adds it to the bootloader.

You don't need much space for swap and root so this wouldnt really affect your windows partition.

Hope this helps. (Im not the best at explaining things!)

[wutever99]

My mistake... it's not Partition Magic, but Boot Magic i was referring to. I was looking at boot magic, but apparently it can only be installed on a FAT 32 partition, but my XP is NTFS. I didn't really want to go through the trouble of repartitioning out some hard drive space just to install this program, so i was looking at GRUB and LILO. Just curious, which HD should i install it on? My LINUX or XP? I assume it'll be XP as it is my primary drive. Which is easier to setup? Also, if the bootloader isn't installed properly (knowing me, i'll do something wrong), what kind of damages can i expect, and are those damages easily rectified?

[darklordsatan]

Well, you need to install it to the MBR, thats the best since it will allow to select the OS at boot time, if you'd install it to the Linux partition, then you'd have to use a boot disk.

The worst that might happen if you install it in a wrong way is that youll screw the MBR, but then you can fix it by reinstalling it again, however, notice the MBR Is not a simple thing... Once I was under windows some years ago, then uninstalled Linux by deleting its partitions and reinstalled windows into the MBR (the bootloader that is) and I ended up with a screwed FAT32 partition (but I managed to recover the files with Drive Rescue), well, not to scare you but you have to be careful as with any "partition job"

good luck pal

[martinfromdublin]

Were all your drives connected up at the time you installed Mandrake? If no, you could try connecting everything, run the install disk again, you'll then get an option to 'upgrade' your exisiting Mandrake installation. Take that option and let it run, it'll only take a few minutes as everything is already there but at the end it will install a bootloader automatically which will pick up your Windows system as well.

Martin,

Dublin, Ireland

[wutever99]

ok, i'm thinkin of just installing all the drives together and try re-installing Mandrake. That seems to be the easiest way, other than installing a bootloader. Should i just boot into windows and load the cd, then run the Mandrake setup? and if so, would it detect the Linux drive, even though it's been booted into XP?