Dual booting the System with Windows and Linux.

[Aaghaz]

I am currently using Windows XP on my computer. Well Linux is included in my college syllabus. I don’t want to delete XP from my system instead I want to make my system usable for both Windows XP and Linux. In short I want to make my system Dual Boot System. Please let me know appropriate solutions on this as soon as possible. I will really appreciate your efforts put in. Thanking you in advance.

[Dolsy_bendal]

First of all you should place both the operating systems on two different logical drives. Suppose your hard drive has 4 Logical Partition viz. C:\,D:\,E:\,F:\. You have to keep place XP in to C:\ drive and place Linux into any other drive rather than placing it into C:\ drive. It is suggested that Windows should be installed to drive which is first bootable by the BIOS. Suppose you have installed Linux in to E:\ drive then E:\ drive will be divided in to 3 partitions viz./boot,/root and /swap. In case of multiple hard drive you must install Windows on first primary master drive and you must install Linux on the primary slave drive.

[Aleksandra]

Well above information is enough to select the hard drive for the installation. The below code will let you how drives are labeled in the Linux? In the single hard drive divided into multiple logical drives you will find the following information. C:\ = /dev/hda1, D:\ = /dev/hda2, E:\ = /dev/hda3, /boot = /dev/hda4, / = /dev/hda5, /swap = /dev/hda6.In case of Multiple hard disks you will see C:\ = /dev/hda1, D:\ = /dev/hda2, E:\ = /dev/hda3, /boot = /dev/hdb1, / = /dev/dhb2, /swap = /dev/hdb3. Now you can proceed with the Installation process of Linux.

[kraal]

To proceed with installation you should select the location. You can skip the /boot partition if you have selected location manually. I suggest you to create boot disk. If you don’t create boot disk and anything wrong happens with boot loader setup then you will not able to boot the Linux till you reinstall it. You have to install Boot loader. More popular are LILO and GRUB. It will install into MBR. It will overwrites the Windows boot loader and result in to neither o/s loading. If it works fine Linux boot loader will be the by default loader for your system. It will provide you select windows or Linux.

[mv]

Now we have to modify the boot.ini in the Windows which will help you to search and boot the Linux /boot partition. boot.ini file is located into C:\ directory . It may be protected by the OS,so it may not visible to you . To make visible go to Tools then select Folder Options tab and click on view. You should use the following command mount –t msdos/dev/fdo/mnt /floppy and also use th following to allocated 512 bytes in the boot sector. Dd if--/dev/hdb1 of=/mnt/floppy/linux.bin bs=512 count=1 You should also set the timeout option by Timeout=10

[Aleksandra]

It may possible that Windows boot loader file may be corrupted during this process. To fix it You should perform the following system. Insert the Windows XP system into your CD Drive. You should enter into Recovery Console then write bootcfg/rebuild command on it. It will fix your problem. Once you have finished you should run the system. Windows boot loader will ask you to which Operating system to load. You try to run both the OS and make sure that both of are working properly. I hope you will be able to run both Windows XP and Linux.