Duel boot bewteen win2k and linux

Vincent

ok i'm gettin a copy of mandrax 7 on monday, so how do i set up a duel boot with win2k? and is there any updates available for it and what gfx drivers should i use? i have a geforcemx.

chernobyl

mandrake will automatically give you the option to boot into windows or linux.
simply, mandrake will wanna boot itself by default so to boot into windows just type "windows" @ the prompt.

you can also go into lilo configuration and change the default OS to boot to windows and the time for you to decide etc etc

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Ashley Lyn

Ashley Lyn Cafagna

phaxx

While that's true, I'd like to suggest something else, which in my opinion, is a bit easier, both to install and use.

FreeBSD has a great little bootloader, and what's more, you don't need to be running freebsd to use it. A friend used it to dual boot between win 98 and ME, worked perfectly, and I use it for my NT machine.

You just download two files: (12kb in total)
ftp://ftp.esat.net/mirrors/ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/4.3-RELEASE/tools/bootinst.exe
ftp://ftp.esat.net/mirrors/ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/4.3-RELEASE/tools/boot.bin

Stick them on the desktop or something, click boot.bin, drag it onto bootinst.exe and that should be it, bootloader installed.

When you boot, it looks for what partitions you have, and presents a list, guessing the OS present by the partition type. You just press F1, F2, etc to boot the partition you'd like. It saves what choice you made the last time, and if you don't press anything for ten seconds it'll go ahead and either boot the first one in the list, or the last one you booted.

Red Moose

More importantly, Mandrake 7 is very very old (over 15 months I think). The LILO (linux Loader - the bootloader) it ships will not be able to boot partitions beyond the 1024th cyclinder.

The only way to get it installed to boot as standard so is to make a tiny partition for boot at the start of the drive (having to push all your Win2k partitions up around 100MB to get space for it with Partition magic or something).

OR, you can just leave some space wherever on your drive (I have a 20GB drive, and simply chopped off 5MB from the FAT32 partition). The CD with Mandrake will boot, and will install fine, but LILO in the version that is there will absolutely NOT boot the linux partition if you don't have the kernel under the 1024th cyclinder.

Make sure you make the bootdisk when the installation offers to - and then get ready to download aroudn 150MB of updates for it (Mandrake 7 uses KDE 1 I think, and is kernel 2.2 based at that as well). That's a bare minimum as well. Around 20MB for the new kernel source, 30MB+ for KDE 2.2 or GNome if you use them, 20MB+ for XFree86 4.1 and that's just the start.

NVidia have GFX drivers available, they work fine and give the same (slightly better in some cases) performance as windows.

But for the moment forget about gfx drivers - you will need to download LOADS of packages to get it up to date, and to get LILO to boot from anyplace on the drive (it's irritating to have to make a tiny 50-100MB partition, and then the real partitions way up at around 2000 cylinders in or more).

What happens is LILO will write to the MBR and setup options to boot either the Win2k partition or the linux root partition. When you select Windows it will give you the Win2k normal boot menu; when you select linux from the lilo menu it expects to find the kernel etc., below the 1024th cylinder (old bug, fixed ages ago, current LILO can boot from anywhere).

Go to ftp://ftp.esat.net and into the Mandrake directory to get recent packages.

Oh yes, another crap thing: the RPM with Mandrake 7 is 3.0 based, I think. That means you will need to get rpm verion 3.0.5 first to upgrade to the 4.0 database, then you can update the other packages from the FTP server.

I estimate maybe 150MB, but maybe more.

Gerry

I agree with phaxx. The freebsd bootloader is nice and simple, and it works, without messing up win2k. The freebsd fdisk utility has saved me a lot of bother also, by letting me fix up partition tables which were messed up by disk drake.

sutty

Well from my setting up of Mandrake 8, it has two boot loaders. LILO and an other one (can remember its name) if you have the Two OS's on the same disk just different partitions use lilo. if you have a other HD with linux on it use the second boot loader that comes with Mandrake. Also go for Mandrake 8 not 7.

At the moment I have win2k/Win98SE and Mandrake 8.

win2k has its own 30gig IBM drive with a NTFS F.A.T

then win98SE and linux share a 30gig drive (10 gigs for linux) every thing works grand

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Ciaran Sutcliffe
aka: sutty
[HIV]sutty
For a good time goto:
http://www.hotinternetvirgins.com

Vincent

ok i got my hands on a copy of mandrake8, i have it installed and i'm useing the freebsd bootloader. Now i have a few questions i cant see my linux partition in win2k, and how do i get into my windows partions in linux? (both fat32)And Is there a linux version of winamp btw?

Gavin

Linux winamp - xmms

Viewing from 2000.. strange it should pick it up. run disk administrator ?

in order to access windows partitions from linux, you must mount em..

make a folder in you /mnt directory
cdrive, or windows or somat

then type
mount /dev/hda(x) /mnt/windows

if that doesn't work try

mount /dev/hdaX -t vfat /mnt/windows

where (x) is the number of the partition windows is installed on. Type mount to view all your already mounted partitions and you can use fdisk to show you what other filesystems are on your other partitions. You can use this to figure out which has windows on it. This should probably be moved to unix....