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Dual-Booting Linux & NT Without NT Boot Loader
Patrick McGouirk asks: "I work in a mixed-OS house, and need to have both Windows NT and Linux installed on my laptop. While everyone in this situation knows about the Linux+NT mini-Howto, I was installing SuSE 6.4 this weekend and accidentally did something that seems to have created an alternative solution. I installed NT as usual (hda1, primary) then installed SuSE (hda2, primary) + swap, as well as a third shared FAT32 partition (hda3, primary). I put lilo on hda2, but while fooling around with YaST2 I made hda2 active by accident. When I rebooted lilo came up with the choices of Linux or NT, which I have switched back and forth several times this weekend with no apparent problems. While in theory I knew that both Linux and NT care less about which partition is active (as long as it's a primary), It never occured to me until now that you could actually change the active partition to dual-boot. My question is this. Does this seem a safe method of dual-booting? If so this solves the basic problem of everytime you update Linux you needed to copy the new lilo to NT's root drive. It also makes Linux your primary OS!" I'm running this one for all of the Linux/NT folks out there who didn't know about this trick.
I installed the NT boot loader in the _partition_, and lilo on the master boot record. It works flawlessly. Is one better than the other?
BTW, you said that you have a "shared" win32 partition. I thought winnt didn't support win32?
And I've had no troubles. The upside is that if you're like me and have a spare machine to experiment on, you have a bootloader that can handle non-ms os choices.
I've had BeOS, Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Win2000, Win98 on that machine and LILO can handle them all
BTW, if you try Win2000, it requires its own custom boot sector ... if you install LILO in the MBR, W2k won't boot ... but with LILO on the partition boot sector, things work just peachy!
The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.
I've been doing that for a while, too.
What's even more fun is when you add the mbr of the second drive to your NT loader list, too.
Then you can boot and LILO comes up.
Select 'NT' and the NT loader comes up.
Select 'Linux' and LILO comes up.
back and forth all day long if you like...
;-)
I got tired of reinstalling lilo, I've been doing this at least 1.5 years. Don't know if it's necessary, or even possibly wrong, but all I do is set lilo to install in hda? (linux part), make that partation active, and make sure i pass
table=/dev/hda
in lilo.conf. Always worked, and getting lilo back is as simple as fdisk in any os. Duel booted nt/95/98/etc this way
bash: ispell: command not found
This sig left intentionally blank.
simple, easy, works, lots of nice features and WAAAY retro.
I have had a system together using OS2 boot loader which would boot to any of the following OSs
os/2
dos/win 3.11
win95
winNT
linux
each OS was in it's own partition, but because of M$ stupidity, I had to play partition games, so that each of the M$ os's thought they were in C:
this ofcourse meant I couldn't share apps between the various flavors of windows.
os/2 had no problem being in D: in an extended logical partition, and linux went in an extended partition too.
of course, linux could see all the partitions, but couldnt mount the winNT/NTFS or OS/2 HPFS partitions.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
other=/dev/hda1
label=windoze
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label=Linux
read-only
root=/dev/hda6
Works beautifully. I have been using this to dual boot Red Hat and Windows 2000 for some time now.
ALSO: You can install LILO to the MBR with Windows 2000. I've also been doing this for some time now.
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How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Only problem is that BootMagic (at least the one I have) had to be installed on a Win9x system (FAT16/FAT32). Not a problem for me because I have a WIN98 partition for games, but something to think about if you only want NT and Linux (or any other combination not involving Win9x).
Je ne parle pas francais.
Hmm. I have had a great deal of success with the "part" boot loader - not just for the switching (which of course is good) but for working around the usual four-partition limit per HD.
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-=DaveHowe=-
Yeah, that is true. However, once you make a boot floppy, you don't need the Win98 version anymore. Same with PM. It can all be run from boot floppy.
Fun!
"...we are moving toward a Web-centric stage and our dear PC will be one of
EverCode
PowerQuest has a product called BootMagic that comes with Partition Magic. It is excellent software and very flexible. It can do most anything you want or need.
Just try to mange 5 OSes without it! This software makes it easy.
EverCode
"...we are moving toward a Web-centric stage and our dear PC will be one of
EverCode
There's a utility called Power Boot (www.blueskyinnovations.com) that does on purpose what you did accidentally. You install as many OSes as you want on various partitions, and then Power Boot lets you pick which partition to boot from. Very simple and clever, and I've had no problems with it. You can also hide partitions from each other, which is useful if you're installing from an OEM cd. (Not that you would of course. That would be stealing. ;) It even will rename partitions to c: if that helps your os. I sound like a commercial, but I've been very impressed. I had Win95, DOS/Win31, and WinNT for a while, and now I just use Win98 and Debian.