On Thursday 09 October 2003 7:41 pm, david stevenson wrote:
Fully agreed on the two disks. But I did watch someone this afternoon install win2K on a system that had SUSE 8.2, and during each of the reboots the win2K install needs he had to select windows from the grub screen. When completed grub and SUSE still both worked fine. The win2K was going into a partion that had been ntfs and he asked win2k to refomat it as fat32. YMMV David
2 disks is not particularly relevant. Windows demands a c: partition all to itself - this can be quite small, particularly for the NT variants [NT, 200, XP], where the bulk of the install can go on another drive letter. Similarly, GRUB or LILO like a primary partition on the first drive, ie a drive which could be c:, apart from the filesystem, although GRUB and LILO give more options. What you really need is more than 1 primary partition on the first drive, rather than needing a second drive What windows does normally, is it tries to set its own partition as the active partition. Being so dumb that it thinks it is the only operating system in the world, it will set what it sees as the c: drive at install time to be the active partition, without regard for the consequences. It seems not actually touch the MBR for the disk, only the partition table [provided there is already an MBR]. If you have GRUB or LILO, residing in its own partition, all you need to do after a windows install [dunno about after NT, but I don't think it has changed], is in windows to set the GRUB or LILO partition to be active. So before you start, your sequence is MBR - [partition table] - GRUB partition - Linux Windows leaves this: MBR - [partition table] - windows partition Recovery is just a matter of resetting the partition table. I have always recovered from a windows install using the windows tools to reset the active partition, but if you have an NT variant, you could also recover a Linux boot by setting the GRUB partition as a windows boot option, and get to Linux that way. If you then fix GRUB [or LILO] from Linux, and include windows as a boot option, you can then boot to GRUB, to windows boot manager and back to GRUB - or on to windows or Linux of course. Although I have never recovered a partition table by this route, it is certainly possible, because I have set windows boot manager to boot LILO and GRUB. [I think that windows 2000 needs SP1, because M$ included something that reset the partition table every time 2000 boots, with the intent to disable OS/2 boot manager and hence OS/2 on the same machine]. Vince Littler