Installing Windows afterFedora

Craig White craigwhite at azapple.com
Fri Oct 2 23:30:54 UTC 2009


On Fri, 2009-10-02 at 19:19 -0400, Bill Davidsen wrote:
> I have managed to go for just under a decade without a Windows machine, but now 
> I need to have such, and I'd like to add it to an existing machine with a large 
> enough partition which was used as work area for a project since shipped. The 
> problem is that while I've put Fedora (and Linux back to SLS and Slackware on 
> 2.2 kernels) on Windows machines, I haven't done it with anything else after, 
> Linux has always been "the last OS you'll ever need" for dual boot.
> 
> I'm not worried about the grub.conf, but the boot sector could be an issue, I 
> have seen reports that XP with patches and Win7 check the boot sector now (XP at 
> patch level 3). other than having to rewrite the boot sector, is that going to 
> be an issue? Any other things I should know?
----
I have seen some reports that certain hardware types require the Windows
bootloader code and if it is overwritten, say by grub, that it puts
Windows into repair mode when booting Windows but I have never
experienced that issue myself and I would think that you wouldn't
either.

You can actually use the Windows bootloader to give you a choice of
which to boot instead of grub if you wish - not really that big of a
deal and there are many examples found easily with Google.

But if you have a Linux rescue boot disk (i.e. the installation DVD),
it's rather trivial to boot into rescue mode, chroot to /mnt/sysimage
and then 'grub-install /dev/sda' to reset the mbr for grub again, but
then you would have to create a grub entry for booting Windows - I have
sample at bottom).

Craig

title Windows XP
        rootnoverify (hd0,1)
        chainloader +1



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