Dual Boot Dilema Request for Ideas

[Bob Lightfoot]

Dear Fellow Testers:
       Since F16-Beta.TC1 I have been trying to build a working dual 
boot windows xp sp3 and fc16 VM.  So far I have not succeeded.  What 
follows are the particular trials and failures.  I would welcome 
suggestions as I know some have succeeded in this endeavor.

1.  The host system is an HP m9040n Pavillion Elite running Fedora 14 
x86_64 with qemu-kvm and libvirtd.

2.  The initial VM was 30GB VM running windows xpsp3 and fully updated.  
I also ran chkdsk /P and chkdsk /R from windows and confirmed it was 
clean as far as windows was concerned.  I then backed up the VM with tar 
-cxf vm_backup.tar.gz VM.img

3.  Attempting to use the F16 installer and the shrink option resulted 
in a fail from an ntfsresize error.

4.  Using the F16 installer and switching to tty2 and running ntfsresize 
and fdisk manually results in a successful install of F16 if I use the 
free space option.  There is no Windows Option on the grub menu 
however.  To get a Windows boot option one has to run commands : yum 
install os-prober ; grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg ; 
grub2-install /dev/sda.  This windows boot menu option , however, fails 
to boot windows instead it returns to the gpxe boot screen and then grub 
menu.  The Fedora Grub2 Entry works as expected.

5.  Using Partition Magic from windows to resize the ntfs partition and 
create free space allows one to use the F16 installer for a successful 
install of F16 if I use the free space option.  There is no Windows 
Option on the grub menu however.  To get a Windows boot option one has 
to run commands : yum install os-prober ; grub2-mkconfig -o 
/boot/grub2/grub.cfg ; grub2-install /dev/sda.  This windows boot menu 
option , however, fails to boot windows instead it returns to the gpxe 
boot screen and then grub menu.  The Fedora Grub2 Entry works as expected.

6. Using Partition Magic from windows to resize the ntfs partition and 
create free space allows one to use the F15 installer for a successful 
install of F15 if I use the free space option.  There is a Windows 
Option on the grub menu and Dual Boot works for F15/WinXP.   Using the 
F16 Installer and Upgrade with skip bootloader option produces a system 
with only a Windows Grub1 entry.  It is then possible to manually 
bootstrap F16 to boot from Grub1.  This Dual Boot F16/WinXP with grub1 
system works fine.

7.  Taking the F16/WinXP Dual Boot Grub1 system and executing the 
commands : yum erase grub ; yum install grub2 ; grub2-mkconfig -o 
/boot/grub2/grub.cfg ; grub2-install /dev/sda produces as grub2 boot 
option for both.  This windows boot menu option , however, fails to boot 
windows instead it returns to the gpxe boot screen and then grub menu. 
The Fedora Grub2 Entry works as expected.

     I realize that a successful dual boot system is not our first 
priority, but was hoping the vast pool of experience might be able to 
shed some light on this issue as to what I am missing.

Bob Lightfoot