dual booting XP and Linux

[Craig White]

On Thu, 2006-04-06 at 12:25 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:
> Washington, CJ (OCTO) wrote:
> > Fedora Core 5 and Windows XP using two Hard drives.
> > 
> >  
> > 
> > Have another question, I tired and tried to load Linux and XP using two
> > different Hard Drives.  XP loaded 
> > 
> > Correctly, and it seemed as if Linux did to. I loaded XP on the primary
> > drive and linux on the slave drive.  I followed the instructions on Fedoras
> > site on how to dual boot two operating systems and installed grub in the MBR
> > on hda.  Every time I tried to boot the machine, the MBR was I guess ignored
> > and linux never booted.  XP kept booting.  So I found a website that
> > mentioned removing one of the harddrives, installing XP on it, then removing
> > that harddrive and plugging in the second harddrive as master, install Linux
> > on that one, then plug in the hard drive with XP as the slave drive.  Then
> > booting into linux and changing the grub.conf file. 
> 
> I found it easier to let the WinXP boot manager chain load GRUB
> than the other way 'round. MicroSoft products like to be in
> charge. While GRUB+Linux is not a good match, it is a reasonable
> match, and works pretty well, whereas GRUB+WinXP is a poor match,
> and the WinXP boot manager is a pretty reasonable tool. Once GRUB
> is in memory, it's just GRUB, however it got there, and can load
> Linux just fine.
----
it really doesn't much matter - generally, it's whatever is more
comfortable for the user but the user is likely to get more and better
help using grub on this list than the Windows bootloader.

In general, I have found dual-booting a waste of time and energy and can
only see the point of it on laptops...for people not wanting to give up
the Windows option.

Craig