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.

Comments

I've been doing this for ~1 year...

[Lupulack]

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 ... a far cry from the NT bootloader method ( which involves creating a custom boot-sector for each OS as a file )

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!

Re:I've been doing this for ~1 year...

[jclarke]

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!

That's interesting.. because just two days ago, I installed rh6.2 on my new IBM Thinkpad 600X, then installed w2k professional on another partition, then reinstalled lilo with a rescue disk, added w2k to my lilo.conf, and everything works nice. Where/how/why does it need a "custom boot sector"?

Fun With Boot Loaders

[paulywog]

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...

;-)

Linux+NT the easy way

[IO ERROR]

Just install LILO to the boot sector of the partition, rather than to the MBR. (Most people should do this anyway.) LILO will boot NT just like it will boot Windos 9x. An example /etc/lilo.conf entry might be:

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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Multi-OS support on Intel

[DaveHowe]

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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