Dual boot windows 2k/gentoo

therobot · Apprentice Joined: 07 Jun 2002 Posts: 256 Location: Canada

alright, I know there are plenty of threads floating around about this, but I just wanted to get a central definative answer going here. What is the best way to install both of these and have it work smoothly. Right now, I have win2k on hda, and gentoo on hdb, to boot, I have to go through the bios menu, which is really annoying, I would preferably like to have it boot up into grub, and then choose either windows or gentoo. I am just about to reinstall both operating systems, one on hda, one on hdb, and was wondering if anybody could give me any advice on how I should go about this.
thank you very much.

BillyD · Guru Joined: 05 May 2002 Posts: 323 Location: Australia

It seems that Windows sometimes gets upset if it is not on the first hard disk, but this can be countered in grub using the map command. Apart from that, there is really not too much to it - just add a line to your grub.conf pointing to your Win2k partition and you should be able to boot into it from grub.

You need to install grub after you have installed Windows, otherwise your boot sector will be overwritten by Windows.
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therobot · Apprentice Joined: 07 Jun 2002 Posts: 256 Location: Canada

the problem I've had in the past with this, is when I try to point grub at windows, I never fail to get an error message about NTLoader not existing.

BillyD · Guru Joined: 05 May 2002 Posts: 323 Location: Australia

What does your grub.conf look like?
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We used to have hominid cousins that were vegetarian. The palæontological record suggests that our ancestors killed them and ate them.

gilesjuk · Posted: Sun Feb 23, 2003 2:16 am Post subject: Re: Dual boot windows 2k/gentoo

Most painless way is not to move the drives around, Windows 2000 can get upset if you move the drive from master to slave. Reinstalling Windows is boring

add:

title=Windows
root (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

to grub.conf and see if that boots it. if not then you can always do

dd if=/dev/hdb of=/root/boot.lnx bs=512 count=1

then add this to your windows boot.ini as follows:

c:\boot.lnx="Gentoo"

copy the boot.lnx file across to the Windows 2000 partition of course.

Ideally Grub should work

therobot · Apprentice Joined: 07 Jun 2002 Posts: 256 Location: Canada

It currently looks something like this, which isn't working at all.

dol-sen · Posted: Sun Feb 23, 2003 2:57 am Post subject: win2k blues

I just went thru this myself a week or 2 ago.

I have a similar setup as you

Threre are several methods that work for some not for others.

This is what I ended up with and works good for me. I have winXP on hda1, hda2; Gentoo on hdb & hdc. It seems the best way is if your motherboard bios will let you, change the boot drive to hdb, leave win2k's bootloader on hda intact as if it were the boot drive. Install grub to hdb use a grub.conf file like mine below.

therobot · Apprentice Joined: 07 Jun 2002 Posts: 256 Location: Canada

thanks, I'll give it a try