Powell, Stuart wrote:
Hello, Andrew.
I have done this without any problems on a pair of laptops, one HP and one Dell. Both came with XP Pro pre-installed. On the HP, I was able to use the SuSE installation to shrink the NTFS partition down to make room for SuSE 9.1, and grub was installed to the MBR, and it automatically added an entry to boot into XP. Of course, the NTFS shrink caused a chkdsk at the next boot into XP, but other than that everything was fine.
On the Dell, the NTFS shrink wouldn't work, so I used Partition Tragic to shrink the NTFS partition, and then just installed SuSE into the empty space. Again, grub in the MBR has an entry for XP.
I am curious about what you've heard about problems with this kind of setup. I wonder if you've got your wires crossed with the old LILO and the 1024 cylinder limit thing. That hasn't been an issue for a while now, and AFAIK grub never suffered from that problem.
In your setup, you should be able to leave the 80GB Windows drive as the master, install SuSE onto the 20GB slave, and just tell it to put grub into the MBR on hda, i.e. the master.
Bye for now, Stuart.
-----Original Message----- From: Andrew Schuh [mailto:aschuh@atmos.colostate.edu] Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 2004 2:00 PM To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: [SLE] dual boot suse 9.1 and XP
Sorry to bring up an often asked question, but I'm wondering about the best way to dual boot SUSE 9.1 and XP. I've previously used Redhat and Fedora (before Core 2) and in the past I've just installed GRUB/LILO to the MBR of my Windoze install. I'm a little wary concerning the issues that have been raised with dual booting the 2.6 kernel-based distributions and Windoze. Also my p4p800 doesn't have the option of LBA=enabled. I have two hard drives with Windoze on the first (80G primary)and I want SUSE on the second (20G slave). I tried installing GRUB to the MBR of hdb and then switching my boot order to make it first but it wouldn't boot that way. Any suggestions?
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Actually, this is what I'm concerned about: http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2004/05/fhassel_windows_not_booting91.html. Everything seems to be talking about installing SUSE and Windoze on the same disk but I can't be sure. I just don't want to hose my Windoze install. I tried to add the driver update they talked about but SUSE refuses to do anything (partition, etc) to the disks after it incorporates the update. I assume it might be fine if I just do the install and put GRUB on the hda MBR. But . . . . I have been wrong before.