[Glastonbury] dual boot issues

[Nick Irwin]

On Tuesday 11 May 2004 20:59, peter.t.cole wrote:
> It's been a while since i posted ! Knoppix has come to the rescue at
> work again to recover data off of an XP laptop.
>
> Any way on to my main reason for posting. I am always mutter about how
> good Linux is at work i gave someone a copy of Knoppix they decided that
> they wanted to try a hard drive install of Linux so i they copied the
> mandrake 10 DVD an were going to dual boot with XP.
>
> OH dear it installed linux ok but would not boot into windows he coul
> not recover windows the only way he could restore windows was to pull
> the hard rive an install in another machine and do a secure erase ( he
> did use partition magic to create the partition for Linux).
> I have been doing a bit of googleing and it seems that mandrake is not
> the only one having problems Suse is as well this was in a review that
> was posted one Linux today also i have seen posts about Knoppix Hard
> drive install on this as well. The older version of Mandrake is OK as i
> have dual booted to xp with out problems. Any thoughts?
> Maybe MS is messing about with partitions to stop us being able to dual
> boot !!! now i have got a devious mind !!


Well, I installed Linux for a number of people here at Uni, mostly in dual 
booting scenario's (Mandrake 9.2 mostly). The one undeniable truth that I 
found was, Windows MUST be on the primary IDE port and it must be the master 
drive, so the only viable option is to have linux overwrite windoze' 
bootloader with its own.
Of course you don't have to seperate the 2 OS's onto seperate drives, but if 
you do, keep Windows on the primary and linux on the slave drive.

HTH

-- 
Nick Irwin
Term-time E-mail: nirwin at blueyonder.co.uk
Home E-mail: nirwin at pulbah.plus.com