Re: [SLE] Windows install *after* Linux
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On Thursday 21 September 2006 11:08 pm, M Harris wrote:
On Thursday 21 September 2006 18:21, Paul Abrahams wrote:
It's fairly straightforward to install Windows and then install Linux. But what is not so straightforward is to do Linux first.
Yup... but it is do-able with a little planning. The first thing to know is to put windoze on a primary. Second, make sure the rest of the drive is partitioned with valid Linux partitions... in other words, only one windoze partition and no blank space. The second thing you need to keep in mind is that the windows install is going to wipe out the MBR... so you're going to loose grup and not be able to boot into Linux. But, not a problem... boot into linux from the Suse DVD and take the "other" install... not new, not update. Then select the repair tools (expert) and use the tool to rebuild the MBR. This tool will read the current system and correctly setup grup (usually). Then add the correct windoze line to the grub menu.lst in /boot/grub and you're set. By-the-by... its is always better to install windoze fiirst... what am I saying... its always better to "uninstall windows first". :-)))) But seriously, installing windows first and then Linux prevents you from having to rebuild the MBR, and it allows the Suse installer to correctly add the windows boot line to grub automatically.
All of these things are good ideas, but I'm not sure which ones other than the regrubbing are actually necessary. Apparently my troubles were due to a cabling problem that caused lots of erratic behavior. I reached that conclusion when I wiped the hard drive clean (it had always passed the Maxtor tests) and tried to install Windows in a single partition just for laughs (and Windows is of course laughable). I got a disk error after the reboot that's part of the installation process. There were actually two cables involved. All my problems had started when I moved my system to a new case, which involved removing and reattaching the IDE cable. But at the same time I moved my hard drive into one of those docking frames, and that's apparently where the problem really was. The docking frame compresses its little stub of an IDE cable, and apparently the compression introduced some kind of fault. I moved the drive to a different frame, and all of a sudden everything seems to be working flawlessly. It might have been easier to find the problem if the system malfunctioned consistently, but it didn't. In fact I was eventually able to get a full Linux system up and running; the problems with the cable manifested themselves only when I tried to get Windows into the mix. As an example: faced with an empty machine, the Windows setup invites you to create some partitions. I created 3; the first one was primary and the other two were logical. After the cable correction, I did the same thing again and got three primary partitions. (One of them was Linux boot, one was FreeDOS, and one was Windows.) Since my original system had Windows on a logical partition and the Linux boot partition at a high location -- and it all worked -- I'm inclined to think that you can actually get away with quite a lot if your cables don't do you in. :=)
Paul...is this on your HP by any chance... cause there is a better way if you have the HP restore original software options. ?
No, it's a homebrew. Paul
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Paul Abrahams