I dual-boot everything, multi-boot. I've found that GRUB is the easiest bootloader, because you can change /boot/grub/menu.lst by rearranging or adding other entries from other distributions you have install there.
The most recent distribution will write the MBR. Let it. It will always look for and "see" the Windows partition and make an entry for booting. Ubuntu, SUSE, and Debian will find all distributions and list them so you can boot them from GRUB. In the case of Fedora, Red Hat, and perhaps others, Windows is listed as "Other," but it will boot it. However, I have not installed a distro yet that will not pick up a previously-installed Windows partition, list it, and make it bootable. In the case of wanting other Linux distros to also be available, go to their /boot/grub/menu.list, copy their boot instructions and then past them into the distro's /boot/grub/menu.lst you just installed. You can re-order them in any order you chose. The top one will always be the default boot-up. It is possible to install Windows on a primary disk that is second, but then you will lose your GRUB settings and have to reinstall the Linux distro(s) to have one of them write. The /grub/boot/menu.lost file is the key to making it boot the systems, and in the order, you prefer. The largest number of distros I've had on this piece of crap machine, with a 40MB hard drive, at any one time is seven, including Windows. That was allocating allocating only 5MB per distro. I save all my data files on a second hard drive that is master 2. If it does not show to mount, you can add the drive to the /etc/fstabs file. They all would be available to boot using this method. Like I've said before, this may not be the "right" way, but it's a way I figured out myself and it has never failed, so I use it. Thanks for listing. Bill On Wed, 2005-10-26 at 15:34 -0700, Dennis Bagley wrote: > Hmmm. I've done several dual boot installs with only a few problems a > couple years ago and none recently. (At least as far as the "dual > Boot" goes.) > > Everything I've read on the subject is consistent that > Windows bootloader wants Windows installed first on the > primary drive. > > If you do that, then install just about any of the current distros on > the other drive/partition(s) > tell grub (my preference) to install on the primary mbr. > The grub configuration tool, during install, lets you pick which os is > the default if no menu select is done. > > I've had it work successfully with Suse, Mandrake, Ubuntu and Fedora > Core 4. (The last two on laptops!) > > If you later remove linux, resetting the mbr back to its Windows state > is just fdisk mbr from the command line on a Windows boot. > > Dennis > > > > On Wed, 2005-10-26 at 14:15 -0700, Charles Stevenson wrote: > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > > Hash: SHA1 > > > > You'll probably want to jumper the windows drive as slave and > > the Linux drive as master. This way you don't have to munge the > > Windows MBR stuff. Or in whichever way make Linux the primary > > boot device and then configure a bootloader as Sebastian said. > > > > peace, > > core > > > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > > Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux) > > > > iD8DBQFDX/HfGAuLrxOyeJMRAsV7AKDCVkgIx5hoVh9+vxfeo8msVwp4sQCePAjc > > no7ioZgraEEzThsw4boHDr4= > > =uUuL > > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > > > > _______________________________________________ > > RLUG mailing list > > [email protected] > > http://lists.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug > _______________________________________________ > RLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug _______________________________________________ RLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
