<resloved>Multi-Boot between linspire 5.0 and windows xp professional

[dandono]

hi, i am new to linspire 5.0 and i find it very cool compaired to windows. i would like to know how to multi-boot windows xp professional (sp1 or sp2) and linspire 5.0. what operating system do i install first and can i multi-boot with an operating system made by a different company?
thanks, dandono

[visualAd]

You should install Windows XP first and ensure that you have not partitioned off all the disk space for XP. Once you have installed XP, you can then install Linspire on the spare partition - it will rewrite the boot sector and give you a menu when you start up your PC which will enable you to choose which OS you want to boot into.

[ALL]

to add to what VisualAd said, the MBR(Master Boot Record) that Linspire uses is kina annoying, really bright, and "fancy looking" i personally like a plane text boot selector, and when i wanted to use windows' MBR i had problems booting into Linspire (here is the thread: here).

-ALL

[dandono]

is there a way in linspire to get it to set windows xp as the default boot os? i have not tried installing linspire on my computer at the moment because i have got 100GB to back up and copy to disks before i can do anything to do with installing os. i thought it would be xp before linspire because linspire is a newer operating system. if i installed linspire before xp the would the xp boot loader not pick up on linspire?
thanks, dandono

[visualAd]

is there a way in linspire to get it to set windows xp as the default boot os? i have not tried installing linspire on my computer at the moment because i have got 100GB to back up and copy to disks before i can do anything to do with installing os. i thought it would be xp before linspire because linspire is a newer operating system. if i installed linspire before xp the would the xp boot loader not pick up on linspire?
thanks, dandono

When you install windows XP is overwrites the boot loads and you have to re edit it manually to get the Linspire boot option back, and yes, you can have Windows set up as default.

This PC I am working on now dual boots with Fedor Core and the Grub boot load and I have windows set as the default OS.

[dandono]

cool. i have heard that people dont like the linspire boot screen because it is bright or something. i dont realy see why people moan about something they see for about a minute
thanks for answering my question

[dandono]

i have installed windows xp professional on a 36GB partition on a 40GB HD and linspire 5.0 on a 4GB partition. according to the xp setup windows xp professional is still there and acording to the linspire multi-boot menu there is only linspire. i have lost windows xp but i know where it is but linspire does not know it is there. windows xp pro is on a NTFS partition. how do you manualy change the boot-menu or get it to pick up on windows xp?
thanks

[visualAd]

I think Linspire uses the Grub bootloader. I don't know where you would find the cofiguration tools, but the config file is called grub.conf. Windows XP is still there but you need to find out exactly which disk it is on and which partition it is on before you can put it back in the boot menu.

[dandono]

one hard drive, two partitions. xp on first partition and linspire on second partition. linspire only shows one harddrive (partition) in the My Computer folder. Does this meen i can not get it to boot to xp or is it just the different file systems?

[visualAd]

It just means that the partitions have not been mounted. Each disk drive on your PC has a device file in the /dev directory which corresponds to the hard disk. hda for the first, hdb for the second and so on ...

To view the parition tble for a p[articular disk goto the command line and type the following:

# fdisk /dev/hda
Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/hda: 4311 MB, 4311465984 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 524 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1          25      200781   83  Linux
/dev/hda2              26         286     2096482+  83  Linux
/dev/hda3             287         319      265072+  82  Linux swap

Command (m for help):

Be very careful not to delete any paritions. Just use p to display them. You can then see the device file for your NTFS parititon and mount it usinf the following command:

#mkdir /mnt/ntfs
#mount -t ntfs /dev/hda3 /mnt/ntfs

The directory /mnt/ntfs should now contain all the files for your Windows Parition.

[dandono]

can you tell me exactly how to do this like open blah and type in blah. how do i get that partition table up?

[NoteMe]

It says how to, in his quote.


fdisk /dev/hda

then press p



But if it is as simple as with debian, you have a file called menu.lst in the folder /boot/grub/, there you can just add it in. What do add depends on where you have Windows installed. But if you have it on the first partition on the first HDD then it would look like something like this:

title Microsoft Windows XP Professional
root (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

[kfcSmitty]

also, it may not be hda.

it all depends which IDE your HDD is connected to.

HDA - Primary Master
HDB - Primary Slave
HDC - Secondary Master
HDD - Secondary Slave

Is LinSpire merely another Linux Distro? I thought it was different..

[dandono]

i ran your command NoteMe and it came up with this:

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 5005.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)[list]
should i still go ahead with the next part?

[dandono]

Disk /dev/hda: 41.1 GB, 41174138880 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 5005 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 4438 35648203+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 4439 5004 4546395 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5 * 4439 5004 4546363+ e W95 FAT16 (LBA)

[dandono]

ok i went ahead with what you said and it worked but because my stupid little brother who thinks he knows a lot about computers (who cant even shut the thing down) tried to fix it and got half way through a windows xp install. it should still work after it is reinstalled because the bootloader is allready set up like it should. how do i set the default operating system on the grub boot loader?
thanks for the help

[TomGibbons]

... how do i set the default operating system on the grub boot loader?
thanks for the help

Well I believe the GRUB config file is stored here; /boot/grub/grub.conf. Take a look in there and see what you can find Nothing like poking around to learn about something. It's like a law or something.