Setting up Dual Boot?

[Negated Void]

Hello!

I'm loveing gentoo already!

I'm a little stuck on the last section of my install process and was wondering if i could get a quick little 'what to do' off of a benivalent soul

I have Two hard drives, with the second one (detected as hdh) partitioned a couplea times. One partition is Windows XP, another is Gentoo, Another the Gentoo BOOT, another the LInux SWAP.

After Installing gentoo, and grub, grub wouldn't run Windows right (i think i might have overwrote the windows MBR) and i needed windows (sadly), so i had to overwrite the MBR with the XP one. So now my computer just goes right to XP upon boot.

I have my recently-created grub boot disk.

What i need to know:

How to re-install grub, without erasing the windows boot option - so i can dual boot.

Thanks soo much!
Merry Christmas (if you're celebrating it)
-Matt

PS - Thanks again! I love the Gentoo Community!

[Privateer]

Hi!

AFAIK you can't have two bootloaders... but there shouldn't be any problem dualbooting Windows and Linux with grub.

Boot your system from the Gentoo CD and mount your root partition somewhere. Then mount your boot partition.
Create your grub.conf (/boot/grub/grub.conf):

[Negated Void]

Hey, thanks for the advice

It works great for the 'Gentoo Linux' option, but if I select windows XP, then it gets as far as displaying 'chainloader +1' and the cursor just sits there, flashing.

I think this is because the MBR of the drive use to contain the bootloader from XP and now dosn't, resulting in XP not working right. Maybe i need to copy that XP loader onto the start of the partition, not the MBR? It says i could install GRUB to a partition in the install guide - something similar.

Thanks very, very much!
-Matt

PS - I notice your syntax for grub differs from the Install Guide's - Just preference? (like the install guide uses a bunch of '=' signs.)

[Negated Void]

After some reading of the boards, it seems this is caused by windows' inability to boot in certain combinations? There might be a fix with (map) but i don't know if it's right.

More details:
Two hard drives, hd0 & hd1.
Hd0 has one partition - Data, fat32
hd1 has a couple - 0 being Windows, 1 being extended, 2 being my linux boot (ext2) and 3 being my linux root (reiserfs)

(all in grub numerating)

Thanks again for your help!
-Matt

[Privateer]

Hi!

As far as I know Windows expects its boot partition (it's a bit confusing -> in the world of Windows the terms "boot partition" and "root partition" are used wrongly, on the root partition there's the boot loader and the system partition is known as boot partition) to be the first partition on the first hard disk. Maybe that's your problem... (Windows on your second disk).

With grub there's the possibility to "hide" partitions and "map" disks.
I used the first one mainly when I installed several Windows versions with dualboot (so that every Windows thought it's residing on the "C:" drive).
The second one I never tried, 'cause I always had just one hard disk. Its purpose is to "swap" hard disks -> so maybe using this feature fixes your problem.

Another thing that came to my mind is the "makeactive" function in grub.

Try this:

[flying_monkey]

Matt,

OK, now I'm no expert on this, but in general, here's the way you have to install to get Linux to coexist with XP. First, from Win 2000 on, including XP, it has to be booted from its own bootloader. If you want to run Linux, you install grub to the first block of the linux partition. In the case of your system
.0 (except he refers to /dev/hdh when I think he means /dev/hda), the grub session would have

[Negated Void]

Thanks for the help, Privateer, but it still gave the same results as before.

Flying Monkey's solution looks promising, so i'm gonna give it a shot.

Thanks sooo much guys!
-Matt

[Negated Void]

Hello!

Sorry for the slow updates, i've been horrendisly sick, and only rarely have the strength to sit up and work on this.

I'm getting errors with the 'DD' line - theres not enough space on the floppy disc apparently?

Would it be possible to just copy it right onto my windows drive, or would that overright everything?

Thanks!
-Matt
PS - i'll try other discs too - i didn't think of that till now.

[Privateer]

Hi Matt!

Never tried to use the Windows bootloader in conjunction to grub. Give it a try...
The only thing I definitely know is that Windows 2000 and XP don't need their own bootloader. At my office (where I need Windows :-/ ) I had Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP (all three of them thinking their primary partition was C: ) and Linux all together on one disk, each started with the help of grub.

The way Ed mentioned sounds reasonable, so both of them should work... Your idea to try it with different disks is surely worth thinking of, though.

Bye,
Dan

[BlackBart]

what if you reinstalled the windows boot loader to the boot record of the windows partition? (maybe boot to the recovery console and run fixbr?)

[flying_monkey]

Matt,

I think your problem here is relying on my memory. I know that the command is something like that, but it is only writing something like 512 bytes, so unless the disk was already full, that aint the problem. The guy who showed me how to do it will be in MOnday, and I'll corrrect the post then.

Sorry,
Ed
_________________
"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"

[plate]

Allow me to refresh your memory.

[flying_monkey]

Thank you, Plate, that was exactly what I was looking for. I had it almost right.

Edited commands to do what Matt is trying to do:

Install grub boot record as before. Then copy it to a file as follows:

[Negated Void]

Well - I tried everything, Have a file c:\bootsect.Gentoo weighing in at 512 bytes, and a Gentoo Linux boot option.

But it just reboots if i select it.

Maybe i did the Grubbing wrong - Do i root & setup to my Boot partition or my root partition? (i did boot)

*sigh* keep trying
-matt[/quote]

[flying_monkey]

Matt,

I find that "But it just reboots if i select it." part strange. I guess to figure this out, we really need to know what your partitions look like. How about do the following:

Under Linux, even your chrooted version, enter