Tranfering Linux

[Kevin E. Glosser]

On Sat, 2003-05-17 at 12:44, Cyber Source wrote:
> absolutely, i do it all the time, same drives, different drives,
> whatever. Try to have a plan of what you wish to accomplish

The plan is VERY important. And the decisions may depend on what version
of Windows you are going to run.

Windows NT,2000,XP are a little different in how they treat the
MasterBootRecord(MBR) than are Windows 95,98. This can affect the
bootloader you choose to use.

When I switched to Windows XP a while back, I had issues with it and my
MBR. Grub would not function properly and I ended up making a boot disk
as a temporary fix.

Here are my recommendations for dual booting with XP...
1) put the OS's on separate hard drives(not required, but simplifies
things)
2) put Windows XP on your master hard drive
3) put Grub in the MBR
4) install Windows XP first
5) make a boot disk during the Linux install(just in case) :)

XP will insist on making a partition on your master hard drive IF you
try to install it on to your slave drive. And that is very ugly and
unnecessary. It will also kinda messup the way XP handles assigning
drive letters, as it will make that tiny partition be the "C" partition.
Then it will make all of the Linux partitions have the rest of the
letters, giving your real first Windows partition some strange letter
assignment. Avoid this by following recommendation #2 above.

I also like having at least one FAT32 partition on my XP drive, due to
Linux not having write access to NTFS 5.1 partitions. When I mount my
NTFS 5.1 partitions in Linux, I get only read access. So, for
transferring purposes, I create minimum one FAT32 partition.

Uh, that's all I can recall at the moment, hope it helps.

KEG