Dual booting

[DannyG]

Hi guys, Im new to the forum and firstly want to say thanks for your help with a few things i was able to search and read up about.

Ive been thinking of using two o/s's. One HDD would be solely to run win xp and the other Linux. Could anyone tell me if there is a way of being able to pick and choose which o/s i'd like to run at start up. is this something that can be done in the BIOS or am i going to have to swap cables to master on each drive every time i want to use a different one? I was reading an article about updating the boot.ini file...but as i understood that'd be used to boot from a partitioned single drive for each o/s?

Thanks for your help..as i said i'm new to this. Any help is much appreciated

Danny

 

[DonNagual]

I had a dual boot system for XP (english) and XP (Japanese) and each time I switch on, it would ask me which OS I wanted to load up. Assuming this could also be done with linux as one of the OSs, I did a quick google for you, and found this:

http://www.zdnetasia.com/insight/network/0,39044847,39048805,00.htm

 

[tdeg]

Pretty much every single Linux distrobution has this as part of their installation process.

The key is to partition your harddrive to say half and then install windows.

After windows is installed, install Linux. During the installation steps it should ask if you want to install a boot loader (either GRUB or LILO). Most of the Linux distributions will pretty much automatically set it up for you.

 

[DannyG]

Thanks alot guys, it pretty much worked as you said. I installed Linux on master and XP on slave...when i boot MandrakeLinux opens a boot screen asking you what O/S you'd like to use. Pretty cool i think. works a treat.

Thanks again

Danny

 

[Neuron]

Lilo/grub

I had a dual boot system once. I used the SUSE Linux GRUB, and it was CRAZY trying to get it off of there. Does anyone know how to remove GRUB? or for that matter, delete the linux partition?


thanks,

 

[tdeg]

fdisk /mbr

will restore windows boot.

you can delete the partitions in windows disk management,