How I dual-booted XP pro and fc2

[Frylock350]

I originally had problems dual booting my box with xp pro and fc2. The box had a pre-existing installation of XP on one hard disk and a second unpartitioned disk for fc2. The install of fc2 went smoothly but upon reboot GRUB hung. To fix this i used xp's cd to restore the xp bootloader to the MBR. I tried installing fc2 again but this time I installed GRUB to the boot partition of my linux hd instead of the MBR. Upon reboot XP loaded. The trick is to get XP's bootloader to launch grub. To do this boot the machine with the fc2 cd1 and type 'linux rescue' at the prompt. Then type 'su' to gain root access. Mount and format your floppy drive using the instructions posted here, but make the filesystem type vfat (fat32) instead of ext3.

http://www.alwanza.com/howto/linux/floppy.html

For XP to boot GRUB it needs a copy of the bood sector of the linux /boot partition. To obtain this copy the boot sector to the floppy you just formatted. Type this command

dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/mnt/floppy/linuxboot.bin bs=512 count=1

Reboot into XP and copy the linuxboot.bin from the floppy to C:\

Open the boot.ini file (hidden file located in C:\) and add the line

c:\linuxboot.bin="Fedora Core 2"

Reboot and you should be able to select which os you want. Selecting Fedora Core should load GRUB.

I learned most of this from.

http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux/grub-w2k-HOWTO.html

[Finalzone]

You can use Fedora Core 2 Rescue Disk instead of Disk 1. You can also load linuxboot.bin for Fedora in shell mode you mount hard driver from windows XP.

[Jman]

Moved to How-To.

[don_rogers]

Hi
I tried the proceedure mentioned above to dual boot XP and FC2. There is just 1 small mistake in the dd command the input file should be from where you installed grub, for me it was in /dev/hde2 so my dd command would be

dd if=/dev/hde2 of=/mnt/floppy/linux.bin count=1 bs=512

after doing this I able to dual boot FC2 & Windows XP (XP is on /dev/hde1). I hope that this helps

:)