[Westwales] Linux with XP

[Colin Sauze]

Pax wrote:

>The Landscape changeth!
>	When I went down to the shop to buy the Mandriva kit it had turned into the Fedora 5
>kit. Dim prob, I've run Red Hat, decent partition manager. Change bios to boot from cd, disk in
>drive, choose language, then it tells me it can't find the cdrom. It is reading from the cdrom
>and printing to the screen to tell me it can't find the cdrom, recursive or what! Why do they
>do this? If I had a fiver for every time I've put a Linux boot disk into a cdrom drive for it
>to tell me that it can't find the drive it is operating from I'd, I'd, I'd, well, I'd have
>a lot more money than the disks cost me in the first place, but that isn't the point.
>

When you boot from CD's the BIOS loads a floppy disk image off the CD 
which in turn loads up the OS and CD-ROM drivers. This fools the OS into 
thinking its booted from a floppy and it accesses the boot image with 
the same calls it accesses a floppy with (this also makes the floppy 
drive inaccessible!).  So this might explain this error. Saying this 
modern BIOSes have another mode for booting CDs without needing to 
emulate floppies and a lot of Linux distros seem to be converting to 
this method although I don't know if Fedora is amongst these. Problem 
with this method is that older PCs just flat out refuse to recognise the 
CD as bootable so they aren't that common yet.

Have you got some kind of weird CD-ROM drive? Most IDE CD drives (e.g. 
virtually all drives made since about 1996) shouldn't have any problem 
when booting a linux installer.

>	Anyway, I guddled about in my bag of goodies and found a copy of Linex ( the Distro
>from Extremadura) which did boot, and not only did it boot but it presented me with a copy
>of Qtpartman (is that right?) which I think somebody mentioned works? yes? 
>
Yeah it should do the job providing its got NTFS resizing support.

>So, by the time
>I've done a full day's teaching, and faffed around with the boxes it was too late to install.
>I have a couple of the worst infected boxes on defrag and will go ahead with Install on Monday,
>subject to any cautions warnings or advice that might appear on the group over the weekend.
>  
>

>	If you are thinking of offering advice, especially where Windows is concerned, please
>treat me gently. I am probably coming from the opposite direction to everybody else, I have been
>running Linux for ten years, whereas, before I took this job, my only experience with Windows
>was a nightmare three months in 1998, that I prefer not to recall.
>  
>
What i'd do with the window systems is to setup one PC perfectly (you'll 
need to do this once per type of machine as drivers etc will vary) and 
with the smallest windows partition you can get away with. Then boot a 
Linux liveCD and use dd to copy the partition to an image file onto a 
network drive or onto a DVD.

If windows had the first partition on the disk which being the first OS 
installed on the machine it generally will be try doing:

    dd if=/dev/hda1 of=windowsimage.img bs=1048576

This makes a sector by sector copy of the entire partition and saves it 
to a file called windowsimage.img. The bs bit sets the blocksize and it 
seems to work best if you copy several hundred kb per go rather than a 
single sector (512 bytes).

Now to install the image on another machine run:

   dd if=windowsimage.img of=/dev/hda1 bs=1048576

Now your second PC will be configured identically to the first. 
Obviously if the hardware varies between machines this can be a problem, 
but i'd hope a school has lots of identical PCs???

You can also use this technique to copy any OS so if you put Linux on 
you can duplicate it this way too although other tools such as System 
Imager do exist to do this.

If this is a really common problem you could make a Linux mini-distro 
and stick on a bootable DVD along with the windows image and have an 
automated reinstall. Alternatively store the images on a network drive 
and have it install over the network. It should be possible to make 
windows rebuild itself but my windows knowledge isn't good enough to do 
that :).