[Lancaster] Dual Booting

[Ken Hough]

Martyn,

When we were talking about dual booting last evening and the problems 
when the inevitable re-install of MS Windows overwrites the mbr, I 
ommitted to mention yet another possible problem.

Without additional software, XP (ie NTFS) partitions can be a bit of a 
problem. AFAIK, Linux can mount NTFS and can read from it, but is not 
guaranteed to be safe for writing.

I mention this because if newbies, probably nowadays using XP, believe 
that they can access NTFS without restriction, it could give Linux a bad 
name.

If anyone knows anything to the contrary, I would be interested to hear 
from them.  I should add that I've had no personal experience of XP and 
have no intention of gaining any.

One of the advantages of dual booting Linux + MS Windows has been that 
Linux can mount and read/write MS partitions, specificaly FAT16 and 
FAT32. I've successfully set up quite a few dual booting systems with 
Win98. It can work well, but there can be some serious problems if 
(when) things go wrong with the Microsoft side of things. There are ways 
to manage/minimise problems, but IMHO, this is not made clear enough by 
any of the major Linux distributors.

A good way to prodeed is to avoid the default choice of putting boot 
code into the mbr. Instead, install it into the boot record of a linux 
partition and make sure that that partiton is set as active. After doing 
a reinstall of Win98 (which overwites the mbr and sets it's own partiton 
as active) it is only then neccessary to reset the Linux partition as 
active. You can do this via the MS version of fdisk.

This does require that there is at least one primary Linux partition on 
the master hard drive. I usually set up a small Linux partion at the 
begining of the drive to be mounted as /boot, put the boot code there 
and set this partition as active. This works, but try explaining it to a 
(non techy) newbie who knows little about partitioning.

Ken