Linux Mandrake 10 and Windows XP dual boot Tutuorial

[ceejay949 0]

First have a linux bootable floopy(cause mine does not boot in the cdrom).Pop in the first mandrake cd.Boot on the floppy; press F1 for more options(I did mine in the expert mode)Customize the partition. I did mine with this:(40g harddisk)50mb for the boot partition,512mb swap partition(twice your RAM),5.3gb for the root partition and 5.3gb for the home partition. You can do the partition anyway you want....After installing mandrake 10 install windows xp. I did mine with an unattended installation; by the way i did not take all the remaining free space i just took 15gb; be sure not to delete the linux partitions...Of course after completing the xp setup you can't boot to linux anymore; that is the time you need the linux bootable floppy...Boot from the linux floppy then press F1 for more options then type "rescue" for the rescue mode, it will ask for the disc 1 of mandrake.Pop it in. Then rescue your lilo or grub bootloader after that you can now boot to linux...Where's xp? I don't know why after rescuing the linux bootloader I can't see xp on my lilo bootloader...Logon to Linux; be sure you logon as the "root". Select configure your computer then select boot...Modify the bootloader by adding another entry which is windows;be sure to put the right hardisk partition(on the partition i did this is hda3) so it will know where to find windows.Reboot...now you have a dual boot of linux mandrake 10 and windows xp. All comments and suggestions are welcome, I hope this will help others who are new to linux like me. Good day...

[Echo Kilo 0]

Well, I tried it, but when I choose rescue and attempt to reinstall the boot loader, it exits with an error.

[danleff 0]

After reading the first post, I was afraid this would happen. How did you format your partitions? What utility did you use and be specific on what filesystems that you used for the partitions.

 

Especially for the boot partition, what filesystem did you use...and did you elect to install grub to the master boot record?

 

Finally, are you using and ide hard drive or sata?

[swvines 0]

i don't know this seems confussing to me. Would it have been easier to install XP first and then Mandrake so it can reconize XP First. But if I was you I would have just installed Mandrake. I don't know how much you have used windows or XP But you will found out that windows stinks.

[danleff 0]

There was a bug in the Mandrake partitioning utility and kernel 2.6 with the geometry of the hard drive. If you used the Mandrake partitioning utility to set up the partitions during the install, and had a NTFS filesystem using XP. This bug was apparently resolved in Mandrake 10.1.

 

So, since XP always wants to be first, installing XP first, then installing Mandrake 10.1 would work easily.

 

I think this is what ceejay949 was trying to avoid.

 

If you have to use Mandrake 10 and XP, it is easier to install XP, use PartitionMagic (or another utilty) to make a fat32 partition after the NTFS partition (say to use for a data file to hold files needed to be accesses by both OS'), then install Mandrake 10. Grub or lilo will be able to boot both XP and Mandrake without a problem.

[ceejay949 0]

Sorry guys. I have been busy lately...By the way echo kilo what is the error?...In reply to danleff; I did not use any utilities. I chose NTFS For XP and ext3 for Mandrakelinux. And to make it more clear I used lilo and installed it to the master boot record(IDE hardrive). Here's my current configuration 3.9gb root partition(ext3-hda5), 800mb swap(hda6) and 1.9gb for the home partition(ext3-hda7),15gb for xp(NTFS-hda2)and the rest are two primary partitions which I'm planning to install another OS and the other one will serve as backup...I did the same process. Thanks to all of you ...