dual boot problems-bootmagic

[Paul Howarth]

hanfamily at earthlink.net wrote:
> On Wed, 4 May 2005, Paul Howarth wrote:
> 
> 
>>On Tue, 2005-05-03 at 18:35 -0500, hanfamily at earthlink.net wrote:
>>
>>>On Tue, 3 May 2005, Mauriat wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>>I bought a new compaq computer with win xp partitioned the
>>>>>drive installed fedora with grub to load. I had everything
>>>>>working then I booted windows it goes into pc recovery and
>>>>>overwrites the boot section so it only will boot windows.
>>>>>Is there a way to get this to work?  If not is there a
>>>>>way to make a boot cd to access the linux partition.
>>>>
>>>>Just an idea:
>>>>Try re-installing grub to your boot partition or root partition
>>>>(wherever you boot) and then use the NT boot loader in XP to load
>>>>linux. This way you are not re-writing the MBR.
>>>>http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm 
>>>>http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+NT-Loader.html
>>>>
>>>>Mauriat
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>I  checked these out but they seem to all require a floppy drive
>>>which is missing on my computer. Partition Magic also has boot magic
>>>has anyone had any luck using it to dual boot xp and fedora?
>>
>>Using bootpart does not require a floppy disk. It is a way of setting up
>>the Windows bootloader so that it can boot Linux. You will, however,
>>need to install grub on the root or /boot partition of your Fedora
>>installation. What does the partitioning of your disk look like? Can you
>>boot from the rescue CD (or 1st Fedora install CD and enter "linux
>>rescue" at the boot: prompt) and enter "fdisk -l" at the shell prompt?
>>
>>Paul.
>>
> 
> I always keep a copy of the partitioning when I install I wont bother with 
> track info
> /dev/hda                size in mb
>   /dev/hda1      vfat    5382
>   /dev/hda2      ntfs   12925
> /dev/hda3        extended
>   /dev/hda4      vfat   30004
>   /dev/hda5      vfat   20000
>   /dev/hda6      vfat   20000
>   /dev/hda7      swap   1004
>  /dev/hda8       ext3   6991
> I actually reinstalled grub to / before I quit yesterday figuring it
> would be part of the solution. Reading the howto bootpart refers to
> is very old since it refers to lilo but it says you need to copy the
> bootsector.lnx to a dos floppy and then to the windows ntfs partition.
> I guess I am not understanding it right. The last dual boot I did was
> a win98 and it was easy.

You can run bootpart natively in XP and have it write directly to the 
NTFS partition. No need for a floppy. Just get bootpart to create a boot 
entry for the /dev/hda8 partition (you can use "bootpart /?" to see 
which partition number bootpart assigns that partition), assuming you 
installed grub in that partition. Bootpart should be able to write the 
appropriate bootsect.lnx straight to C:\bootsect.lnx

Paul.