[Nottingham] Installing XP on a 2nd partition

[Benjamin White]

Hi James.

To answer your questions,

XP should install fine on hda3.

However it will overwrite your bootsector with Microsoft's.

I have found it is best to make a back up of the boot sector using:

% dd if=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 of=/root/mba.block

and then after having installed windows xp, load up your favourite livecd,
mount your root partition and dd it back like so:

% mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1
% dd if=/mnt/hda1/root/mba.block bs=512 count=1 of=/dev/hda

and then reboot, and modify grub or lilo appropriately to be able to boot Windows.

You can get nasty side effects if your partitions are out of order on your
drive before installing XP (e.g. hda2 comes before hda1) as the XP installation
 renumbers them to be in order, and having just installed to hdaX then
restoring the bootsector back, it then tries to read hdaY instead.

Regards,
     Benjamin

James Gibbon wrote:
> I want to install XP on a spare partition on the first drive
> on my main box. Here's what I've got:
> 
> Disk /dev/hda: 60.0 GB, 60022480896 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7297 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> 
>    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/hda1   *           1        1581    12699351   83  Linux
> /dev/hda2            1582        1842     2096482+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
> /dev/hda3            1843        7297    43817287+  83  Linux
> 
> I'd like to install XP on hda3.
> 
> Will XP install on an arbitrary partition? Can I get access to Linux
> back from running lilo from a bootable Linux CDROM?
> 
> Thought I'd ask here, as I feel sure someone has tried it.
> 
> TIA
> James
> 
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